CAVAET to bystanders: these points relate back to 2003 - ancient history in IT and business terms. Somewhere around there Macromedia Australia was going through some "restructuring" which in part allowed Rocketboots and other opportunities to come into being with many positive flow-on effects to follow in this part of the industry. To be perfectly clear, Robin (and even Macromedia Australia) were bystanders carried along with the tide - and with the points I'm wanting to raise here I don't think anyone in Australia were in a position to fix.
> > Macromedia (at the time) did not lift a finger in support. You were > > working for them at the time. > > I seem to remember a lot of email correspondence, some site visits > and the like. To be fair to you, Robin, this Macromedia thing was new to me. Unlike the rest of my fellow trainers, I didn't have contact with Flash, director, Authorware, 3DSMax, etc. I had been drinking the Microsoft cool-aid for a looong time before that and CF6/6.1 was the first year Coldfusion was brought out from QANTM's intranet "pidgeon-holing" and into the classroom. I probably didn't know who you were or what role you could play. > > > giving licences away to an educational institution would have reaped > > benefits to this day and beyond. > > Do you mean (a) giving some educational licenses to QANTM for it's > own use, or (b) giving away commercial licenses to each student? neither paying for licenses for intranet use is perfectly understandable. That part is a business. A bit like (then) future employers of mine who use CF for their turnkey school admin software. and no, not giving full copies to students. They can use their dev copies just like we all do now. What I'm talking about could be classified as "teaching aids". CF6 was the first version that had to have it's DSN's defined by the CF admin. Now, we tried to get around that. you may remermber my cfaussie posts (and help from Spike) to try and get the student development environment as close to what I had used to teach ASP in the years before (both at QANTM and also a government TAFE). "But the students can use developer versions" you say? Yes, for that lesson. They can set up their DSN on their local machine, point it to their database and away they go.... until the lesson ends and they have to move classrooms/labs. that one thing - defining DSN's - destroyed the effectiveness of using developer versions; made then next to useless. Unlike ASP or earlier versions of CF, students could no have their working website files (including a little MSAccess database) on a floppy and just drop it into "C: \ inetpub \ wwwroot" and it would just work. it was now a workflow management mess. what's the solution? setting up central CF servers so the students used dreamweaver on their workstations to RDS to their server space. They could keep going no matter what classroom. (and DW ultradev RDS was really flakey then too). So, 120 students and their personal websites and team projects. That would have to be Enterprise versions, and more than one. > In the case of (a) the education price of CF is already very low and > I don't see how that would have affected the student's future career > path - if you mean that it would have affected your management's > decision on whether or not to continue with CF, that would be a > strange criteria, to dump a course with 120 students for the sake of > a few hundred dollars. I'll deal with the future career path in a second, but please understand, your dealing with discounted price Vs $0.00. how can you compete with that? if you mean that it would have affected your management's > decision on whether or not to continue with CF, that would be a > strange criteria, to dump a course with 120 students for the sake of > a few hundred dollars. I mean exactly that. You could still reach the teaching outcomes with PHP instead of CF. From a management's perspective, what's the difference except for a price tag? especially when you're dealing with multiple enterprise licenses. ColdFusion owed us nothing, except as a teaching aid. Should we pay for the privilege of evangelizing the platform/ exposing hundreds of students to it? Here's where the short-sightedness of "a sale is a sale" comes back to bite: one single bright, enthusiastic, student (G'day Rob.S) single handedly introduced his employers (now in Sydney) to buy into CF when they were almost about to go to PHP. That meant CF license sales. one student out of 120 did that. Created sales from no-where, just because I taught him Coldfusion. And that's only one that i know of. Why do you think that Microsoft gives away their product to educational institutions? they fully realise it's a fertile "breeding ground" for the future. > Is there any amount of money or support from Macromedia that would > have stopped that from happening? I think that is clear. Yes. Free Enterprise licenses to educational institution if used as a teaching aid. Now-a-days I work at a University. There is NO HOPE of introducing ColdFusion to the Faculty of IT if they had to pay for CF enterprise licenses. Heck, it's gotten so bad that you'd better turn up with the boxes as well just to smooth the deal. Too hard? depends how short-sighted and gutless Adobe's policy in supporting educational institutions are > > considering the number of students going through the place, that's a > > lot of lost embassidors. I still stand by that claim..... just where *are* the next lot of developers coming from? ------------------------------------------------------------- to all who say "The developer edition is free!" but, in an educational context, it's bloody useless stuck on public labs machines or the student's laptop. ------------------------------------------------------------- --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "cfaussie" group. 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