Dell dumped WO because of Microsoft. Microsoft didn't like the idea that
one of the largest PC sellers in the industry was not using ASP so they
basically built an ASP replacement for the WebObjects applications for
Dell for free.
The original WebObjects applications took around three months to build and
cost dell under $100,000. There were less than 5 engineers on the
project.
It carried Dell through to about $8 million/day in transactions. Pretty
damned fine return on investment.
It took Microsoft about 8 months to build an equivalent-- and they had
many more than five engineers on the case.
Apparently, Dell still uses WO for some of the internal pieces....
---
One thing to remember, as well. Bad engineering can make any project
fail-- including those implemented with WebObjects.
There is a rampant turnove in technology and in most companies client
bases within this industry. A lot of it is due to the simply lack of
using an appropriate process to build sites. End result; client is
unhappy, site doesn't work, is delivered late, engineers are completely
freaked out, and it typically goes over budget.... but who do you blame?
It is much easier to point the finger at technology than people--
especially when the people to blame are the leaders and decision makers.
For those that know me [and CodeFab], know that we pride ourselves on
applying an extremely refined development process to any project we take
on. End result; we have delivered our projects on time, within budget,
and working the first time... every time.
Sure, it is easier to achieve this level of success with WebObjects over
any other product I have had a chance to play with.
Why?
Because WebObjects is a mature product with over a decade of development
history behind it. This results in a set of tools where the behaviour of
the tools are predictable and relatively well documented.
Sure, it ain't perfect-- but the imperfections are usually small enough
and occur infrequently enough such that we can actually build a
development schedule with the confidence that we are not going to
encounter some random show stopping bug in the development environment
that will skew the schedule.
Not so with most of WOs competitors... I have monitored numerous
developer discussion groups for many different WO like solutions. It is
qutie clear that the APIs change across releases, there are large swaths
of undocumented or unpredictable functionality, and-- as such-- the
developers are missing their deliverables because there is no way to
quantify how much time might be necessary to work around "issues" with the
tools.
b.bum
On Thu, 25 Feb 1999, Oliver Fox wrote:
> Hallo !
>
> As far as I knew
> E-Trade and DELL are not using WO any more
>
> 1)Why ?
>
> 2) what is with UPS and with Fedex (the tracking system stuff) are they
> still using WO ?
> In there URLs I cant see a hint
> (as far as I remember both build there systems with WO in the beginning)....
>
>
> anyone out there who knew something ?
>
>
> Thanks, OLIVER
>
>
