Well it's the middle of the 2000's and the Realitys are still alive and living.
I can share some of the mentality of a customer keeping an older system alive. One of my Microdata guys. He has an 4MB, 400MB Spirit 6000 'Tower' System. When I started with him in 1994, he had 16 users. He now has 28. He pays no monthly or yearly support except for the maintenance on a Printronix P600 which is around $150 a year (worth it). He can add 4 users by purchasing another P-node from Hermann Ellig. This is a $15M (US) company manufacturing private label cleaning products. They run the Results package from A/R, A/P, GL, OE, INV, SAS, Bill of Materials, Financial Reporting, and have heavily tweaked their original Results into exactly what they want (thank you). The office users are double wired, ie cat-5 for their email/internet and serial (COM3) for running Wintegrate/Procomm. The warehouse is wired with many wyse-50's with a combination of multiple slave printers and dedicated serial SP- printers. My main contact is the 1/2 owner (with his brother). He comes from an IBM 32/36, AS-400 background and bought in 11 years ago. He is very, very computer savvy and offers many creative ideas for me to implement in his system. He is obviously fully aware of my other client's current systems, ie D3, U2, MvBase and other natives. He is no dummy and I respect a lot of where he comes from. We've had a few discussions about upgrading and there is the absoulte #1 reason....WHY? I'm not looking for a barrage of suggestions on answering this question. I can tell you that he's incredibly happy and about the only thing that he's missing is speed. Not disc space, not stability, not sophistication. Simply speed. In fact, I'm the only one who complains (I guess because I know better than his users). He's been on some of my client's other systems (VPN or dial-up) and can feel the speed improvement. It just doesn't matter to him. I send any time-consuming processes to the phantom ports and I even have phantom processes generated by the users during the day. What matters is $$$. At present, he only pays for the printer, my time and electricity. Considering the sometimes instability of many contemporary systems, U2 included, I have to agree with him on that point. Microdata had a very good internal battery warning/backup system that was better than a UPS. It actually saved each user's memory stuff and recovered from a complete power absense. We have built a 100% duplicate system for around $1,000 that sits and waits for the enevitable. What's his motivation to upgrade? Spend around $10,800 for the initial 24 licenses, another $2,160 for yearly OS 'maintenance' (whatever that means) and probably $5,000-$10,000 for the appropriate 'server-based' system with the necessary Digiboards to maintain the serial devices? Not to mention my cost to oversee the conversion. Being strictly a Microdata, he cannot jump right into a D3 and will have to play the 'flavor' game on the other systems. Northgate's new Reality may reduce the conversion costs dramatically but there still will be conversion costs. All of this to just improve the speed. His application won't behave any differently unless I take advantage of any new features. So I would be asking him to spend around $30,000 to just improve the speed. That's a hard sell. We are already downloading data to his website and retrieving data from the web. I've added some static web links for maps and UPS for tracking. I've also added Blat for some automatic emailing. All within this 500 byte system. Please do not reply with any suggestions as I know that writing this leaves the door wide open for a boatload of suggestions. I'm just illustrating the mentality of a pretty successfull static company that is pretty happy where they are. He knows that I'm more than happy to represent his best interests when the time comes. It's just not here yet. Thanks. Mark Johnson ----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, September 03, 2005 7:14 PM Subject: Re: [U2] RE: Named Common > In a message dated 9/2/2005 9:18:57 AM Pacific Daylight Time, > [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > > > > Named (aka labelled) common has been common on aps with Pr1me roots for > > about two and a half DECADES; e.g., a quarter of a CENTURY; e.g., > > longer than a few of our list members have been ALIVE. Since at least > > the Carter administration. > > > > I *think* various other MVs quickly adopted it in the 80s. I ported an > > ap from Prime to Ultimate in about 1982 and I don't recall that labelled > > common was an issue. > > However, there are a ton of older systems out there. > Perhaps out of maintenance, perhaps out of warranty, and yet still running > and their owners are happy. I remember in the mid 90s finding an original > Reality still running and thinking ... Wow. > As in, Wow this company is cheap-ass. > I'm sure even today, there are systems still out there, that their owners > haven't upgraded in two decades :) > Will Johnson > ------- > u2-users mailing list > [email protected] > To unsubscribe please visit http://listserver.u2ug.org/ ------- u2-users mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe please visit http://listserver.u2ug.org/
