The attendance of the recent COMMON conference in Reno, Nevada (US) was another sign of the continuing decline of the IBM AS/400 platform.

I attended 9 COMMON US conferences between the spring of 1999 and the spring of 2003. We always had a booth at the expo and most of the time I also presented one or more sessions (resulting in two speaker awards). During that period the conference attendance went down from 3500 to roughly 2500 attendees while experienced attendees reminded everybody how the conferences used to attract 4500 people.

The most recent edition of the COMMON conference (which ended last week) had only 800 attendees.

In the meantime the COMMON organization is going through some rough financial times as well. To anticipate financial losses they plan to scale down the conference even further by reducing the number of simultaneous sessions, offering only 1 lab room, no longer handing out free passes for volunteers and so on. This is certainly not going to increase the attendance during the next couple of editions.

The decline of COMMON is a symptom of the decline of the whole AS/400 platform. The user base is aging. There are no (or very few) new and innovative applications. There is confusion about the identity of the platform after too many name changes.

Each year IBM manages to extend the life of their cash cow a little bit with the introduction of yet another tool to modernize existing 5250 applications (like GUI/400, Webulator, HATS, Webfacing,...) or technology that is supposed bring new (graphical) applications to the platform (using Smalltalk, C++, PASE, Java, PHP,...). The truth is that migrating/rewriting legacy applications is expensive and customers might as well migrate to a platform with cheaper hardware.

The future of the COMMON organization and the AS/400 platform looks grim.