Alan Hald, chairman of MicroAge Computer Stores reckons that he has rumbled IBM’s strategy with the PS/2 family, which he likens to a sandwich – What IBM is doing with the PS/2 is announcing an office integration family, he says, that means office integration from the bottom up, and mainframe integration from the top down, and I compare this to a big sandwich with the mainframe as the top slice, the PS/2 as the bottom slice, and a layer of standards like SNA – we’ll call that jelly – sandwiched in between: IBM wants to start taking big bites out of the sandwich until they eat up the whole market, and the only way to combat the strategy is to follow the ‘Peanut Butter Conspiracy’ – what you do is spread a layer of peanut butter standards between the slices of bread, hoping that IBM will choke on it – and the best peanut butter I know is Unix.
