Redbooks
Although I have been part of the group that is responsible for writing and publishing IBM redbooks for many years, the model behind the International Technical Support Organization (ITSO) remains more or less a mystery to this date. IBM runs a number of ITSO centers (e.g., in Almaden, Austin, Raleigh, Rochester or Poughkeepsie), where assignees (IBM lingo for ex-pats from mostly overseas IBM operations) and local US employees run residencies (again, lingo for 4-8 weeks projects resulting in a redbook or workshop materials) with IBMers, business partners or customers from around the world. Topics range from application development with WebSphere to iSeries performance tuning and DB2 database optimization to Linux on the mainframe. Once the book is finished, it is simply put on the website for free. I have yet to see any other company that publishes high value books and papers that have cost tens of thousands to produce.
Have you co-authored a redbook? Join the Redbook Authors group on LinkedIn by following this link.
1 Comments:
Andy,
you open here an interesting debate about the cost (and the value) of intellectual property (IP) and in particular if there is a model for distributing, in a "knowledge based industry", knowledge as a good without applying an already existing model based on publishing company. I suppose that firstly we should analyse if what we are selling has got a direct or an indirect selling value; also we need to understand if we are operating in simple user-supplier model or in a complex ecosystem where different brokers manage at the end the original IP. From my perspective an IBM redbook (written with the right market perspective) has generated much more value for IBM than the item itself. Anyway something to re-think in a general context.
Guido
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