John W. Colby
jcolby at ColbyConsulting.com
Wed Apr 2 17:04:59 CST 2003
Woaaa. I think the man is angry? John W. Colby Colby Consulting www.ColbyConsulting.com -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com]On Behalf Of Arthur Fuller Sent: Wednesday, April 02, 2003 5:16 PM To: accessd at databaseadvisors.com Subject: RE: [AccessD] ADP vs Access mdb/SQL F**K the NDA. You listers want an ostensible insider's take? Not that I'm close to the bone, just that I have a beta and few high friends in low places. Martin: >> Products are developed by different teams and as I am finding out internal communication between teams at MS is crap. This was mandated by the Fed. Chinese walls and all. No communication among teams = Equal Opportunity for 3Ps. Assuming that Bill and Steve ultimately agree to play by the rules imposed by the Fed, however egregious they might find it, this is the result. Team A rewrites product A2003 with no knowledge of what Team B is adding to product B2003. Even as an alleged leftist (by Hindman et. al., though I don't see it that way, I prefer the term post-capitalist, or one-worlder), this one confuses me. I want all software to work together, across platforms and languages etc. But is the price the virtual monopoly of one particular company that already owns say 89.9% of the software market? On the other hand, does it make any sense that the Access team is excluded from the SQL team's discussions? And even if that perverse interpretation were accurate, would you or I actually kneel down and obey this asinine conclusion? Outlook devs may never know what the Access devs are thinking, and vice-versa. Call me a criminal: I would say FU2 and hold secret meets in Starbucks, passing infa-red notes that explain secret shortcuts, undocumented and officially at least, not guaranteed to work. Beta code, so to speak. I am so disappointed by my tea-leaves reading that I am preparing to bail from Access. I didn't want to do this. For several years I have championed Access over alternative IDEs, and as any sort-list by my name will illustrate. I would do most anything to help persuade MS to reconsider this plan, but it's a fait-accompli I'm afraid. I was one of pioneers of ADP. MS hooked me instantly. Access suddenly became 100 times better than Enterprise Manager. I devoted thousands of hours to ADP, I fought in the trenches and discovered this problem and that problem and found work-arounds and published a few of them and offered a few more here for free, and now MS cuts the legs from under not only me but everyone else who has invested hours in ADP. You have no idea how sick this makes me feel. I have told some close friends who owned the companies I have worked for recently, to bet everything on the ADP/SQL technology. And now I have to tell them that maybe I can reverse-engineer it back to ODBC and somewhow save the day, for less dollars than it will actually cost because I'm so embarrassed that I recommended we trust Microsoft. I don't know what to do now. I think that every moment that I invest from here on in is a moment I should have spent learning more about .Net or Java. I am staying on this list because this is my home, and you are my family. But I am sick to my stomach. Here's the Access 11 I would have designed, imagining for a moment that I'm capable of holding such a job :-) 1. Lose DAPs. Replace this crap with wizards inherited from FrontPage, say, so they can generate pages that require nothing more than a browser, and on the server end nothing more than a successful connection object. 2. Supply a wizard that can inhale an Access app and from it create a corresponding .net webForms app. When it sees a form + n subForms object, it automatically creates either a dotnet subform or a linked page, you choose, globally and individually. 3. Somehow find a way to support the new stuff coming in the next SQL. Write all the IDE stuff as .Net forms etc. so they can be melded into any product. Another beta user on this list and I exchanged some private mail on A11, and found we were both on the same page. There isn't a book here, at the most a couple of chapters. In the O11 rewrite, Access got the backhand compliment. Three new features, wowee! So why the slap in the face? Eat the black tuplip because you own the other one, thereby trebling its value. I.e. force all Access professionals into .Net, our collection of paid courses, certs &c., all of which gen vastly mas dinero than the essentially freebie Access. "Josephine in Hoboken buys one copy of Office Developer... For how much? And can deploy anything she writes anywhere? Say again? Are you some kind of socialist? We gotta nail this chick for a LOT more than than that, FOOL!" IOW, MS is preparing to take our legs out from under us. From now on, each successive version will have relatively less capabilites, not more (i.e. as more of the world's platforms move to .net or java, Access will be orphaned, less and less able to communicate with this world -- of course it will still be able to talk to Word and Excel, but those targets will grow increasingly insignificant). That's my reading of the tealeaves, and f**k the NDA. I am angry. "Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither." -- Benjamin Franklin -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Mwp.Reid at Queens-Belfast.AC.UK Sent: April 2, 2003 2:51 PM To: accessd at databaseadvisors.com Subject: [AccessD] ADP vs Access mdb/SQL All I am saying on this ADPS will remain a viable MS technology. How they interact with the server will changes. There are certain things you can do now that you will be unable to do with future releases of SQL Server. This is an SQL Server problem not an Access one. Products are developed by different teams and as I am finding out internal communication between teams at MS is crap. I was told and I quote "Bill Gates is very interested in Access as a power user tool" when I expressed my concerns over Access 11 offering little in the way of improvements for developers. The real thing that concerns me is the use of the term "Power USer" If MS dont take it serious as a developers tool then we will not see big changes. AS Susan says MS Office and ACcess is a major cash cow for Microsoft. No mission of it going. Lot of attention to ALpha 5 and they did give me a copy and as I said I was not impressed. One final thing. Some of us are privy to internal discussions at MS at times. Until they appear on paper thats all they are discussions. Martin _______________________________________________ AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com _______________________________________________ AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com ---------------------------------------------------- Is email taking over your day? Manage your time with eMailBoss. 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