[AccessD] Alpha Anywhere

It is simultaneously funny and sad. This company is the Enterprise assimilated by the borg.  They 
were never quick on their feet but now they are positively glacial. Users are nothing if not 
resourceful.  When IT couldn't respond, they rolled their own.  What can we expect?  The borg are 
trying to shut this down but in fact it continues on.

John W. Colby

Reality is what refuses to go away
when you do not believe in it

On 9/3/2013 4:29 PM, Jim Lawrence wrote:
> Ha ha ha... a company's owners worse nightmare? :-)
>
> That is what the concept of PC was supposed to be all about. Welcome to the new age of the internet.
>
> Sorry but I found this so terribly amusing, on so many levels and I just can not stop laughing. :-)
>
> Jim
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "John W Colby" <jwcolby at gmail.com>
> To: "Access Developers discussion and problem solving" <accessd at databaseadvisors.com>
> Sent: Tuesday, September 3, 2013 6:44:49 AM
> Subject: Re: [AccessD] Alpha Anywhere
>
> The company I am working for did an inventory and found something like 800 Access apps on employee's
> desktops.  They are trying hard to force the users to stop developing such things and then to
> migrate all of these things to a C# / Java app.
>
> John W. Colby
>
> Reality is what refuses to go away
> when you do not believe in it
>
> On 9/3/2013 8:12 AM, Jim Dettman wrote:
>>     It's not that they cannot, it's they don't want to.
>>
>>     Microsoft has jumped ship in regards to the desktop and are looking to
>> leapfrog everyone by a few years. Their entire corporate strategy and focus
>> is aimed at the web and getting Office users onto a subscription model
>> because the software development cycle as we know it is no longer
>> sustainable.   They don't want anyone on the desktop any more with
>> applications.
>>
>>     The risk is that they may have jumped too far too quickly.  Not everyone
>> has broadband for example and their effort may fail for that reason alone.
>> The other biggie is security; not everyone is comfortable with everything
>> being in the cloud and having someone else in control of your data.   The
>> exposure of the government monitoring programs could not have come at a
>> worst time for them, as it proves beyond a doubt how data is no longer under
>> your control once off premise.   I think that more then anything is going to
>> give people pause about the use of cloud technologies.
>>
>>     But even without that, I think they under estimated the reluctance of
>> business moving into the cloud.  Unfortunately, I believe it's too late for
>> Access.   I really do think their turning it into nothing more then a front
>> end / power user tool that's web based.   Oh the desktop side will still be
>> around for a while, but I think it will stand as is and not change from this
>> point forward.   It's pretty obvious that the last three releases were
>> focused on nothing but the web.   It also seems pretty obvious that they are
>> focused on using macro's with web apps and will not bring anything more
>> powerful on board for coding.  They are also suggesting doing reporting via
>> Excel and that's the last functional piece they need to round out web apps.
>>
>>    There maybe a small glimmer of hope though; they woke up a bit with Windows
>> 8 and have back tracked.  Maybe they'll do the same for the desktop side
>> again and make some improvements, or at least provide some more power under
>> the hood with web apps in order to get existing DB's onto the web, but that
>> seems like a long shot at this point.  Web App's are just too much of a
>> departure from the current desktop DB's.
>>
>>    And so many developers have already left the product.  By the time we would
>> see improvements, there may not be many of us left to use them :(
>>
>> Jim.
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
>> [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Mark Simms
>> Sent: Monday, September 02, 2013 10:03 PM
>> To: 'Access Developers discussion and problem solving'
>> Subject: Re: [AccessD] Alpha Anywhere
>>
>> Thanks Arthur -
>> it boggles the mind that neither MSFT nor Adobe with their near infinite
>> resources....
>> could come-up with a competitive offering ?
>>
>>