Hi, If you have ever worked for a large corp, you will know that in the end, things are made up of small depts with maybe small pots of budgets. Only difference is that there are people that make decisionson how the pot of money is spent.
And then there are committees that make decisions (e.g. corporate architecture) - unless you have buy-in from all of those, they will not go to bat for you. Each of those have a voice in the end. The people that negotiate pricing is one of those groups. If you end up with several groups against you, then you are in trouble. In our case, our app is considered important, but not critical by all means. It was however the first one to use Flex and would have been an example of what can be done. Since we started working on it, the corporate IT has taken a very different direction and large parts of work is being sourced out to outside vendors. We need many licenses because we have so many environments - we have clustered weblogic instances over many different geographic regions - for each of those, we have development, testing, staging and production systems - they very quickly add up. Unfortunately due to the nature of what we do, you cannot just share a bunch of systems on a single unix box or watever to save on licenses. The fact that MM has just been taken over by Adobe is also not helping the situation as it is creating more uncertainty. They are not sure if Flex is going to disappear or what the commitment is to it. In our case, other than selling us something, I do not believe anyone from MM has ever contacted us again to try and maintain an ongoing relationship (from what I know). So all these things start to add up. The fact that we can make changes very quickly and create a very good quality product is not necessarily the determining factor at the end of the day. I think a big part of the problem is that we have a 'I told you so' situation now. We went for something proprietary, and now that we need to expand, we are basically held to ransom. That kind of thing scares companies. Flex did not go through the same amout of scrutiny as other products to be officially approved and considered a strategic direction. We can sit here and postulate for hours and hours about how stupid all of this is and how this is a drop in the bucket - and I agree. Unfortunately we are not the ones writing the cheque at the end of the day. Apparantly the sales person we are dealing with now is new to us - maybe he will come up with something creative. Jonathan -- Flexcoders Mailing List FAQ: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/files/flexcodersFAQ.txt Search Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
