On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 6:24 PM, Kenneth Kixmoeller/fh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Yup, but the real choice is for *us* in out businesses or careers.
The smart money is on diversification. > Stephen has hitched his horse to M$ and .NET. Technically we can > argue all we want, but it is his business decision. He keeps getting > gigs, so it looks pretty good to me. But he's a data ho. "Will code for food." Works for some,... > I'm doing open source. Results? > So-so at best, but it might be me. It's all you, or Stephen or Bill. It's up to you to make the business work. You choice of tools is only one small aspect of your business. "It's a poor craftsman who blames his tools." > Bill has decided to keep his horse > hitched to the good ole' VFP. Good for him! Bad for his customers, if > he has any left. Not so! The other, other, other half of the business is maintaining a big complex, rich client app in VFP 7. It has more features and more industry-specific behaviors that make this the killer app in its small niche. Tens of thousands of lines of code with special pricing schemes. transportation costing and commission calculations. Why change? This one can meet their needs for the foreseeable future. When it needs a rewrite, we'll have to evaluate the lay of the land at that point to decide: port, rewrite, outsource, sell out, web, SOA, Dot Nyet, dabo, whatever. There is man-decades of work in the current software, and years of knowledge of how the business works in the head of my partner and in the heads of clients. We'll find the win-win-win solution for all of us when the time comes. Or maybe we'll be disintermediated by some upstart with a web app. Time will tell. > But *I* can live with that: one less viable > competitor. We all believe that he lives in la-la land, praying that > magic fairy dust will land on VFP. Depends on the niche, really. Until recently, a friend was running a program that ran on windows in an emulator of a WANG 2200A, a machine discontinued 30 years ago. It was cheaper to buy an emulator than to rewite the program. Bill and his customers may be in a similar niche. > The Market will prove out the best business strategy. The market seems to tolerate a wide range of solutions., even several norms from the mean. > As a number of folks have said to Bill: "Good luck with all that." Yeah, really. We're all bozos on this bus. -- Ted Roche Ted Roche & Associates, LLC http://www.tedroche.com _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: ProFox@leafe.com Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
