> From: John R. Israel 
> I believe new management came in and decided to totally re-write
> everything is something else (SQL?)

(huge snip)


Here is an article related to the R&R debacle. It was a $67Million mistake that 
other companies should learn from.
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2005/09/thanks_but_no_t.php
Other articles are still available I'm sure, but finding them is kind of tough 
now given that this was from 2005. We were discussing this and a similar failed 
effort at Oxford Health in CDP between 2005 and 2007. I proposed then that we 
could create a whole page at PickWiki called FailedMigrationsFromMV. Funny how 
so many years later that still seems like a good idea. ;)

R&R had a lot of bright .NET/SqlServer types who arrogantly thought they could 
completely replace the rules of a system that had years of detailed MV rules. 
They over-designed, over-coded, and did all of the things that curmudgeons 
accuse new developers of doing with the new toys that come around every couple 
years. They thought they knew "better" without understanding what it was that 
they were trying to replace.

To their credit, R&R announced the error, wrote off the $67M, and then went on 
to do "something else". Most of us remember that they failed in their first 
attempt but I don't know anyone who knows what they did after that - certainly 
no one in this industry who will admit that they were successful at migrating 
away from MV. :)

My take on this was that this industry lost something like 25,000 seats because 
there weren't enough people there to convince R&R that they already had the 
tools required to update their existing application for a new millennium. In 
this regard, Their failure is Our fault. I can't tell you how many times I find 
myself in end-user meetings where senior management Still doesn't know what's 
possible with their MV system (until I speak up). MV is Always on the chopping 
block just waiting for the axe to fall. For this condition I continue to blame 
the DBMS providers and their hands-off policy regarding their reseller channel, 
where most VARs would rather tell an end-user that something can't be done than 
to admit that they just don't know how to do it. While that's a discussion for 
another time, I suspect that's how it played out at R&R too.

T


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