> I lost a bid once because a nitwith know-it-all convinced the > potential client that they didn't need a tape backup because tape > backups don't work. >
Back in late 1997 we hired a programmer to help with a VFP project that was then being underwritten by GM ($35k/month). It was a marketing management application designed for use at automobile dealerships. Well this new guy had a little bit of background in Oracle and VB, yet liked what he saw with VFP. We had deployed the VFP app to several stores, under the approval of GM, and it was running well. In fact it was running great! Out of nowhere this guy begins to pull the Chest Beating, Loud Mouthing, "I am the expert" crap, and starts to say how we should have used VB and Oracle instead of VFP, because "that is what everyone else is doing". So the owner of the group I was working with starts to listen to this chest beating, loud mouth idiot (the owner was very emotionally reactive), and decides to reprogram a perfectly good, and well functioning app to a new flavor using VB. But he is thinking of using M$ SQL Server because he had a friend who thought M$ was really onto something with SQL Server - because it was a M$ product, therefore had to be good. About that time I decided to relocate to Rochester, and work for these folks via VPN. The writing was on the wall. I saw nothing but doom and peril on the horizon. Well, the initial thrust was to port the VFP app to using either SQL Server or Oracle on the back end, and later we would rewrite the front end in VB, because that is what everyone else was doing. I still recall the conference call when I was told the final decision was to use Oracle v-8. I went to Borders and picked up a lot of books on Oracle 8, and no sooner I got home the phone rang again. Nope, M$ just called and offered a better license price, so we were going to use MS SQL Server after all. Hell of a way to decide what database to use, eh? But wait, there's more! I go back to Borders the same afternoon and return all the Oracle books and pick up all I could for MS SQL Server. Soon after I got home, you guessed it, the phone rang again. Oracle had just cut their license fee to beat M$ so we are using Oracle after all. I said, "Fine, but I am not going back to return the SQL Server books." (I still have the SQL Server books). I went to a different book store, further away, to purchase the same set of Oracle books I had just purchased a hours hours before. Within a few days my Oracle software package arrived and I was on my way... I did okay with the VFP porting to Oracle, other than a few ODBC issues I had to walk around because neither M$ nor Oracle was willing to provide any help that may benefit the other with what I saw as a defect. In short, pretty much all my table buffering went out the window in favor of record level buffering, otherwise not all records changes would commit. I was also having problems with some SQL Pass Through processes unless I processed record changes one at a time. But, the VFP front end app and translations still worked well. Then came The Great VB Cutover, which I was not to have any part of because I was a "VFP guy" (no longer a team player because I voiced my opposition to the reasoning behind the unecessary change). Amazingly, despite having some "little problems" at their own stores with the VB front end these folks began to deploy the VB app to the other GM stores, I guess expecting that somehow magically the VB app would work better hundreds or thousands of miles away from their development team. It didn't. GM ended up dropping the project, but the owner persisted anyway. I soon afterward flew out to a nearby city to do some custom VFP work, and opted to spend a Saturday with him at his place. Before we went out for dinner he took me by his dealership and asked if I could look up some deal numbrs using VFP against the Oracle tables. I had no problem finding the data, while he was watching with his mouth open. It turns out the VB app was not able to retrieve those deal records (and others), and the loud mouth, chest beating idiot had said it was because "Gil is not translating the records correctly." I have no idea what he was doing wrong, but my point was made. The data did exist, and the translations were fine. The problem was in the VB code in how it was trying to retrieve the records. Not my problem, although I offered to help <g>... That was a very quiet evening, as my friend realized he bought into a nightmare, and was now at $1.5m and counting since I had departed in the midst of the Great Cutover. The next time I saw him was when he got married. We went to his wedding, and when I met his wife for the first time she said, "Gil, I heard a lot about you. David knows he screwed up, and you were right. He should never have stopped listening to you." It felt good to hear that, but bad with respect to having seen a friend get hammered for (by then) over $2m all because of some self professed expert who knew more than the "VFP Guy". Well, I blew the dust off the VFP app in late 2000, (which by contractual agreement I owned) and revamped it with some features I thought were good. It has been in commercial service since 2001. And the VB/Oracle app? The last I heard (3 years ago) it finally got re-re-re-rolled out into their own stores, this time for sure error free. They lost their other clients. Oh, they went to Visual Studio and MS SQL Server because "VB/Oracle just is not capable of handling the load we demand." Funny thing, weak little old VFP did just fine, yet Oracle could not handle their needs? Yeah, right. Even VFP was overkill, but Access sucked for certain. Amazing. Let's not even talk about how these folks never bothered to set up any kind of backup for their own, or client, databases. Why? Because they used RAID, and with RAID you do not need to back up! Silly me, archiving is for dweebs I guess <g>... Gil > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Michael Madigan > Sent: Saturday, July 12, 2008 1:04 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: RE: [NF] Retainer Billing > > > I lost a bid once because a nitwith know-it-all convinced the > potential client that they didn't need a tape backup because tape > backups don't work. > > > I have a feeling he's > > going to lose his shirt as he took the word of a 20 year > > old college student > > over 20 + years working with accounting systems of all > > types when she says I > > don't know what I'm doing And I bet she > > wouldn't know the difference between > > a credit and a debit as to how it affected an asset or a > > liability and she's > > probably never even heard of a T account. > > > [excessive quoting removed by server] _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] 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.
