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To: MDGO who wrote (1118)	4/12/2000 3:05:00 PM
From: Hands Off	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1938

Marv: you wrote ... big companies who will set up their own B2B based on the open standards and all the available free, or inexpensive software. What free and inexpensive software might that be? If cheap software were the issue then all mainframes applications would be programmed in assembly language since IBM gives it to you free with MVS instead of COBOL where you have to lease the compiler. I have worked as a COBOL programmer/analyst for IBM, American Express, Bellsouth, Boeing, to name a few and to my knowledge there is not one of them that would incur the cost of inhouse software development if they could buy/install exactly what they wanted on a timely basis. Well, possibly IBM is an exception in some cases. My point is that I believe most of these companies want the exchanges operating as quickly as possible with as a minimum of disruption to their existing business. They know that the real value is in the cost savings that these services will provide and don't want the bother of designing, coding, installing and maintaining another application. They learned with their mainframe applications. In fact taking your argument a step further, it s hard to imagine why any company would buy any package software or utility. Just develop it inhouse. It reminds me of the first time I heard the same argument back in 72-73 I think. I wanted to buy SPSS for some statistical analysis and the DP guys wanted to code some assembly routines to save the cost. I think they are still debugging their macros. Your arguments would seem to apply also to ARBA, ITWO, BVSN and more. Given all the Fortune 500 customers that have signed up for them I just can't imagine that they will all collectively one day wake up and decide they could have done it better themselves. Can you give me some specific examples?