Author: MB Software Solutions
Posted: 2006-03-01 at 10:42:07
Ted Roche wrote:
>1. Scale. Client wanted to move to gigabytes of data, and their
>internal programming staff and consultants they brought in could not
>develop a satisfactory app. Client invested millions in DotNet and SQL
>Server, and went bankrupt. Remants of the company are back to
>megabytes and back to VFP.
>
>
But would the investment in SQL Server have been contributing to this
failure?
>2. Inability to find good consultants. Having gone through a dozen VFP
>developers who were dBASE refugees and should not have been
>developers, company went for the magic pixie dust of Java. After
>millions of dollars of development (sounding familiar?), company was
>bought for hundreds of millions of dollars and entire app was scrapped
>in favor of the purchasing company's existing system.
>
>
I've heard this many times before...and even been part of it on the
reverse side, where we had a decent VFP app and the company that bought
us scrapped it in favor of VB6 and classic ASP (and took 3 times as long
developing it only to not have it anything close to what we had).
>(There are a lot of developers out there who write junk for code. I
>don't think VFP attracts them, especially, perhaps it's just had a
>longer time to accumulate them? I've seen some pretty awful stuff out
>there.)
>
>
Regrettably, I've seen my fair share of bad coding as well, and some in
applications where they sell the app for $300k....yep, I couldn't
believe it. A $300,000 piece of crap that was hemorrhaging from every
orifice. Just another reminder that certainly I should be able to be in
business providing solutions if this is the kind of crap that was
selling out there. <g>
>3. Painted too deeply into the corner: I supported a client for nearly
>a decade who had a legacy system written by a well-known developer
>early in the VFP 3.0 days. There were no best practices then, so there
>were some fairly complex work-arounds. The system was very large and
>very complex, and the micro-managing, penny-pinching boss would never
>authorize an hour spent to rewrite something that worked, no matter
>how arcanely. After a decade of making serious money out of this
>application, he got caught up with a young guy who could show him
>spiffy little tricks in *Delphi* of all things (out of the frying pan,
>into the fire) and, not understanding the differences between
>superficial GUI tricks and the deep functionality of his application,
>put his existing development into maintenance mode to go on a wild
>goose chase with Delphi. He was too cheap and too wily to lose his
>business to this, but his best developers quit, his customer base
>moved on, and when he sells out in a few years, he'll get a lot less
>than he could have.
>
>4. Slightly off-topic from the VFP re-write question, but an answer to
>why not FoxPro: Corporate standards: I tried to pitch a WebConnect app
>to a Very Large Insurance Company. They had standardized on: Macs on
>the desktop, Novell for their network, Oracle for their database and
>Netscape Enterprise for their intra-, extra- and inter-nets. I fought
>this one all the way up to a one-on-one with the CIO, who tried to
>explain to me that Microsoft was "going the wrong way," a view I've
>come to agree with, but for different reasons and with a differnt new
>direction. IT evolution slowed to a crawl in this company, and the CIO
>has taken an early retirement to "pursue other interests."
>
>
How many years ago was this one? Seems like a "dated" example?
>5. Cost savings: Tired of paying experienced senior developers with
>decades of experience in the business niche and this particular
>application, PHB thought it would make sense to employ cheap VB
>developers to rewrite the app in the para-dig-m of the day, VB and SQL
>Server. Experienced developers moved on, weaker devs stayed on for
>free training. New apps took forever to deliver, cost gazillions, and
>lacked the functionality of the original. Customers wouldn't upgrade
>for fewer features. Company foundered, bought up by BigCompany for
>1/10th of peak worth, for customer base. Old code and new code
>discarded.
>
>In summary: incompetence, incompetence, incompetence, incompetence,
>incompetence. Hmm. Guess there is a pattern <g>.
>
>So, Dave, you were looking for GOOD business reasons to switch? I have
>run into few of them:
>
>Good apps need to be rewritten every once in a while, as cruft builds
>up, and the model of the business encapsulated in the code doesn't
>always evolve as fast as the business does. Software tends towards
>rigidity and/or fragility. Refactoring and other advanced techniques
>are designed to extend the longevity of an application, but
>refactoring a gnarly old app can be more costly than rebuilding.
>
>
And for some reason, folks not in the know (PHBs, owners, mgrs, etc.)
don't seem to get that. They think of the house analogy that gutting
the inside of the house HAS to be cheaper than bulldozing it and
starting over.
>When rewriting, you have the glory of starting with a clean slate, and
>re-examining your assumptions. New business models (software rental,
>software as a service, application service provider) may be available
>since the original app was conceived (probably back when we used
>floppies). ACID compliance, disaster recovery, HIPAA and SOX
>compliance can make new architectures a requirement. New component
>models, loose coupling, multi-phase commits, heterogenous backends are
>all designs to consider.
>
>Security is a huge concern with ever-increasing connectedness,
>portability and liabilities.
>
>So, ultimately, the business decisions come down to:
>
>1. What business(es) do you want to be in?
>2. What architectures enable that?
>3. What tools enable those architectures?
>4. What resources do you have available to execute those designs?
>
>When faced with a clean slate project, new languages and tools are
>always a siren song. "There are no silver bullets" is a 30-year-old
>quote.
>
>However, given the specs of a couple of apps lately, I couldn't find a
>justification for writing them in FoxPro. While we have a mature
>language (well-debugged, well-documented and lots of support), some
>great frameworks and lots of programming talent, there were concerns I
>could not address: Microsoft has handed out BILLIONs in legal
>settlements in the last couple of years. Security is a huge concern
>and apparently something Microsoft is still not taking seriously.
>Microsoft has made it clear VFP9 is the end-of-the-road for the
>binaries, with some xBase decorations extending VFP9 into Sedna.
>64-bit is out and support for NX bits mean some loss of functionality.
>
>
VFP9 will work in Windows Vista, though, and I isn't that 64-bit supported?
>Bottom line: a single vendor who is end-of-lifing the product.
>Competing languages with rich features included Perl, Python, PHP and
>Ruby had no proprietary vendor lockin, no preferred data source and
>the flexibility to deploy on many platforms. VFP Web deployment is a
>chain of SPOFs (Single Point of Failure): W2K3, IIS, COM. In
>comparison, if a mod_perl app has a problem on Apache/Linux, redeploy
>on OS X or on Zeus or via CGI. Options. Choice. That's what it came
>down to. The VFP solution was climbing out onto a limb with a vendor
>renowned for orphaning its products.
>
>Orphaning: In the late 80s, I sat in a room back at the Park Plaza
>Hotel in Boston while Microsoft announced the rollout of the NT
>platform. During the Q&A session, a fellow came up to the microphone
>and explained that he was a Microsoft "partner," had subscribed to
>their products and had spent years with a staff of programmers
>developing an app not far from release, but targetted at OS/2. What,
>he asked, was Microsoft going to do for him? His voice was unsteady,
>and it was apparent that he was facing a disasterous failure. There
>was an awkward silence when he finished as the crowd fell silent.
>There was no noise but an occasional clink of crystal against
>silverware. A Microsoftie finally managed to speak up, trying to
>deflect the comment into a pitch for their new development tools. The
>spell ended, but the impression remains to this day.
>
>I can't lead another client down that path. THAT's the business reason.
>
>
Logical thoughts. I'm not saying I agree 100%, because I have no
problem building a VFP application now and supporting it for the next 8
years.
--
Michael J. Babcock, MCP
MB Software Solutions, LLC
http://mbsoftwaresolutions.com
"Work smarter, not harder, with MBSS custom software solutions!"