"Ronald C.F. Antony" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> That's not the real issue. The issue is, that it now appears to
> people that Evergreen is VASTLY superior. After all, why would anyone
> bother totally reengineering a successful project, with additional
> work and new potential problems if not because either
> a) the existing solution is very problematic or
> b) the new solution is vastly superior
Perhaps because reengineering in a different product would be about the same
as reengineering in a new version (I said, "perhaps")? Perhaps because the
difference in cost is a wash? Perhaps the product to which they switched was
given to them along with much engineering support in an effort to win them
over (Dell)?
> Surely, nothing is static in the web space, but mostly because new and
> better stuff comes along all the time. If WO gets replaced, then that
> indicates to people (true or not doesn't matter and is not the issue here)
> that WO has fallen behind the curve or that there is a dirty secret
> with WO that people discover after using it for a while, and when they do,
> they try as hard as possible to get off the platform.
Rather specious reasoning, don't you think? There are plenty of reasons.
Anyone worth anything who's making the decisions would evaluate all the
platforms. If I was about to pick WO because I'd evaluated everything (in my
case, I was just blown away and ignored everything else ;) and then heard
that Dell used to be WO but switched to ASP and I had already decided
against ASP, I would not just change my mind because Dell is using it. I'd
want the whole story. Sharper Image switching says only one thing to me,
"give me the details on why they switched." There are plenty of reasons for
it. There are plenty of reasons why WebObjects is not priced the same as
ColdFusion and there are plenty of reasons why companies continue to choose
WebObjects. Companies like the USPS or the Dept. of Defense.
> In either case, such things are really bad news, particularly since
> SharperImage is not the only such case. You can add E*trade and Dell
> and probably a few others to that list.
OTOH, since there's not a whole lot of news about WebObjects anyway, the
only way to really find out about those companies switching is if you're on
this list :)
> I'm not concerned about WO, but about the message this sends to potential
> clients. If they know about it, they will ask questions like: "Why did they
> switch? Why shouldn't we just use Evergreen to begin with and learn from
> other people's mistakes? etc."
The first question is a good one. The person asking the second question
should be fired (or demoted) because that is no way to evaluate a product
especially when your company's product database is going on the *world wide*
web.
Just an aside here, Apple recently had some problems with their switch to
SAP. It happened right around the time that I learned about the transaction
per minute licensing (I think it used to be per client but this is another
story). My girlfriend mentioned the problem Apple was having and wondered if
it was WebObjects. I assured her that it was not. Since Apple uses
WebObjects for their online store, any problems are automatically thought to
be with WO. Any reasonable person with a little knowledge of how these
things work would figure that there could be something else going on besides
the front-end app server.
Anyway, rant, rant, rant. I've been asking technical questions for days (and
have more - just wait) so this was fun. Sorry about the bandwidth.
--Marc Respass
