Nancy wrote: >Don't you think that the VA is one big fat carrot and stick?
To the extent that this donkey cart model is true, the VA is part of the problem. A single donkey cart with a single big fat carrot and stick tends to reward and punish a single very big and very fat donkey - leaving no carrots with which to reward innovation or effort from anyone else. This is a model that leads to monopolism. For competition and innovation to thrive, we need a different model that promotes and protects open standards and that rewards the many workers making small incremental fixes and enhancements. >They are currently using the standard, and they may succeed in dumping M, but >personally, I think they will fail and the question is whether they do it >before or after blowing millions if not billions in an effort to port this >system to something else. They should just fix what they have an get on with >it. If they just quit trying to get rid of it, I think that they will be >able to bring in new people to advance and maintain VistA, but it they >persist in this misguided effort, they are just shooting themselves in their >collective feet. Failure to fix the old system could very well doom or significantly delay the efforts to replace it. Ironic ;) Part of the difficulty in replacing or upgrading the old applications is in extracting business rules into a more purely declarative form and then maintaining them in two or more forms through the inevitable changes that will occur over a several-year transition. That would be relatively easy if the business rules were expressed and stored in a standard declarative form on the MUMPS side, and extremely difficult if they are not. >Being vendors of a dead language can't be good, MUMPS is certainly not a dead language in spite of InterSystems efforts to bury it. It is the existence of Open Source implementations of MUMPS, such as GT.M/Linux, MUMPS_V1, and Kevin O'Kane's MUMPS compiler, that keep it alive. The MDC was a standards body designed to limit innovation at the language level so as to provide a stable, portable, inexpensive, and scalable basis for development and deployment of enterprise-wide applications. Avoidance of vendor lock-in to MUMPS vendors was a critical part of the whole thing for many years that resulted in an unparalleled combination of price, performance, flexibility, and stability for MUMPS based systems compared to any other available alternatives. That was largely overcome by InterSystems with the acquisition of DSM, DTM, and MSM so they could compete at the higher price points of other database technologies such as Oracle. >at least not unless you deny >what you are I guess, and you become "X" instead of M. That seems to be an >attractive strategy that might be reversed if the MDC became viable again. That is a strategy that began at InterSystems well before the demise of the MDC or the MUG with little things like scheduling the annual Intersystems users meetings at the exact same time as the annual MUMPS Users Group meetings but in a location many hundreds of miles away. I don't see that reviving the MDC (as a thing in itself) would have any impact on it. >Hopefully, the vendors and all of the big sticks with carrots will want to >participate in that effort. If the VA ever sees the light, maybe they will >participate as well. > >If push comes to shove and none of the vendors want to participate, maybe at >least an ANSI standard can exist and progress to be there for the VA to use >to move VistA along after the next congressional investigation explores where >all of that money went when the VA tried to move VistA away from M! > > >On Monday 28 February 2005 02:55 pm, Bhaskar, KS wrote: >> I agree that from a user's perspective, having a standard makes a >> technology easier to accept, sell to management, sell to the general >> public, sell to politicians, etc. >> >> From a vendor's perspective, it costs money to comply with a standard, and >> there must be enough people who say, "If you comply with the standard, I'll >> buy your product" (carrot) or, "If you don't comply with the standard, I >> won't buy your product" (stick). Especially in the case of a public >> company, there is a fiduciary responsibility to the owners (the general >> public) to spend money to maximize return. >> >> In the case of an M standard, who would proffer carrots or take a stick to >> the vendors? >> >> -- Bhaskar > >-- >Nancy Anthracite --------------------------------------- Jim Self Systems Architect, Lead Developer VMTH Computer Services, UC Davis (http://www.vmth.ucdavis.edu/us/jaself) ------------------------------------------------------- SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide Read honest & candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users. Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=6595&alloc_id=14396&op=click _______________________________________________ Hardhats-members mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members
