>From Wjhonson > Of all the jobs posted over the past several years, several have asked > for SB+ experience, none have asked for any other product of that class.
I'll respond to that here because it dove-tails with what I have below. You don't see ads, in-part, because the sites still running the old software are largely not aware that an MV community exists that might respond to such an ad. Many of them don't even know what software they have running on their "DOS" system. Most of them that I run across have no consultants (I dare say "Value-Add Reseller") who strongly insists on upgrades. The result is that they only reach out to the world after a hard drive failure, hurricane, or some other catastrophe. More below. > From: Brian Leach > So an 80% conversion is easy .. Yeah, everyone claims to do 80%, some only really do 50%. But we all know it's that last 20% that occupies your time for the next year or three. So perhaps to further refine the query, I'm looking for tools that really do bring us closer to that 95-98% mark - with no marketing fluff to bridge the gap between there and 80%. I don't have any immediate opportunities but I keep stumbling on these poor sites. And if I do, and picking up orphans isn't my business, then you gotta know that people who do go after that business must be finding more of these. Some of these sites have gone through developers (aka snake-oil salesmen) who claim they're going to convert the software but never do, and eventually the sites just migrate away from MV. It's a terrible story. [uh oh, soapbox alert] You'd think the MV DBMS providers would take some interest in this but I've yet to see any of them pro-actively offer assistance to any of these sites, for-fee or otherwise. I know the original intent was to discontinue support for SB and earlier SB+ in an effort to force end-users to migrate to U2. That tactic worked for some sites but the people who implemented that policy simply didn't have a plan-B for the large number of sites that didn't fall for it. They were thinking about starving out their DBMS competition by leveraging this tool. What actually happened is that end-users decided not to upgrade their DBMS just so they could keep using SB, and these sites migrate away from the model as soon as some "young nephew" comes along. So everyone loses with this predatory approach. I'm not asking any company to maintain software when it's not in their financial interest, nor to chase small sites that are more inclined to drop support than to migrate to a new platform. But from a marketing perspective we all lose when a policy like this is only half-implemented. Regards, T _______________________________________________ U2-Users mailing list U2-Users@listserver.u2ug.org http://listserver.u2ug.org/mailman/listinfo/u2-users
