Happy Holidays To You And Yours From Us And Ours

December 11, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

First of all, thank you.

It is a great privilege and an honor to do the work we do for the IBM i and Power Systems customer base and the software vendors, hardware sellers, and service providers who also serve customers like you. If history has demonstrated nothing else in the more than five decades of IBM midrange computing, it is that we are one single ecosystem, that we are all in this together and always have been.

We did a little bit more content earlier this year, and so that means we can get our Christmas break a little earlier this year, too. And so, this week will be the last issues we publish until the new year. Come what may in 2024, what we know for sure is that we will be here and so will you, as we have been for the past three and a half decades. We may not be booming in the IBM i and Power Systems market like generative AI, the most transformative thing to happen in information technology in the past three decades and maybe ever – depending on how this turns out. And that is the thing, we will not know until we have hindsight, and we don’t have a time machine to go back and fix these things.

Another week or two holding off on that prognostication and employment challenge, which will take perhaps a decade or maybe forever, will not change the trajectory of human history, so our suggestion for the 2023 holiday season is to be extra human, and to be so in the many facets of your life.

Buck the system. Use the human checkout when you shop. Talk to people and be friendly. Make their day and let them make your day with the spontaneous exchange that defines being a modern human in what may be the beginning of a new age of enlightenment. Every day is a holy day on this marvelous Earth of ours, but admittedly the holidays are the time when we are absolutely allowed to appreciate that fully.

But this year, perhaps it is best to make every day special. You don’t have to live each day as if it was your last – that knowledge would be heavy and we never understood how you could be light knowing such a thing – but perhaps you can live each day as if it is real, and important, and ours to share together and make the best of a complex situation that our brains can barely perceive. But, here we are, giving it a go. We are doing better than the dinosaurs, who had a few hundred million years and didn’t develop science and literature, agriculture and alcohol and law, and dare to contemplate God and an infinitely curved Universe of spacetime.

Love us. Love that audacity. And embrace the jolliness and giving nature of the world’s only true superhero in the comic book sense: Santa Claus. A massively distributed giver reminding us in the darkest hours of the season to share. To give, and to receive. You cannot give without also receiving. This is the most important principle, and it drives everything, from the smallest photon flitting around the Cosmos and activating an electron to a new shell in an atom to the actions and reactions between a child and a parent, to the bonds between lovers, to the reaching out and touching between friends and enemies, to the intricate webs of economy, society, and culture that arise from all of these connections, all nested inside of each other in their crazy fractal geometries.

Love us, that all 8.1 billion of us are all here, at this vital time of vital times, and be part of our best us.

And have a happy holiday, and may we all have a more prosperous and peaceful and energetic new year. We will see you in a few weeks, ready to take on 2024.