On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 8:19 PM, Dan Covill <[email protected]> wrote: > > Sorry, Ted, I wasn't being very careful. The experience you state is > exactly what I meant by 'a great idea', there is clearly a market, and > their directory seems to work well for the users. > > I guess when I said 'poorly executed' I really meant 'poorly > engineered', and I'm basing that pretty much on Woody Leonhard's > InfoWorld blog entry: >
These are multi-faceted situations: there's technical, security, business and competitive strategy aspects. It's a complex world out there, and these folks should have given this a lot of thought before they spent $8,500,000,000.00 Much as I like the theories that "Microsoft is stoopid" I have a suspicion they might have a plan. What if they thought they could take the supernodes and run them all in their Azure cloud? Of it could just be a head fake to keep someone else from getting Skype. And if they shipped mediocre software, version 1.0, it wouldn't be the first time. "It takes three versions to get it right" is a myth that even some of the 'Softies believe. They ship v.1 as is, but with MS logos. They tweak the background networking functions and ship a 2.x corporate version that's a little better behaved network-wise, perhaps sticking them in VMs, or creating a well-behaved front end that just serves as a proxy to real engine, that sits out in the cloud. By 3.0, it might actually be adequate. I just can't envision the plan. But that's mostly at a technical level. I'm not the kind of guy who can do the vision thing at the enterprise level where these guys play. Of course, when they bought Fox, there were a lot of slide decks of VB and VFP scripting engines talking to a common database engine that was Access and Rushmore and SQL Server. That plan didn't last long. There were a lot of false starts (anyone remember Active Documents?) So, there may not be as a big a plan as we'd like to think. -- Ted Roche Ted Roche & Associates, LLC http://www.tedroche.com _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[email protected] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
