Re: This reminds me of older business model than Microsoft
That's a bit unfair to IBM's engineers. Yes, it used to be like it or lump it, but they were at least engineers and produced properly engineered systems. The real problems were generally caused by management and the bean counters, as in so many big American companies once they become successful.
Red Hat has for years been trying to define RHEL as the Linux for business and has been following similar lock-in strategies as Oracle, Microsoft, et al. And it seems to be working, or at least lots of companies seem happy enough with the value proposition. Which is probably why IBM bought their company.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
