Wow, what can I say? For starters that Geoff is sure good at creating diversions by playing the drums! I'm just kidding. :-) There's been far more messages about that here than about the keynote itself. (Thanks, Joe, Juergen, and Brad for the transcript!)
Now what ticks me off is that the same misrepresentations about REAL SQL Server being so much faster than both PostgreSQL and MySQL has been made last year, and that I have to repeat myself in settings things straight. There's no way that PostgreSQL would give a result of 36 seconds and MySQL a result of 77 seconds for one and the same test. The results between those two should be really closely matched. This means that the whole 'test' is skewed (in favor of REAL SQL with 19 seconds). Last year it turned out that the most significant part of the 'test' was mainly a zillion INSERTs done by a single user and with indexes down! (WTF?) What about doing that with indexes up and by 200 simultaneous users, plus a bunch of real queries? I don't know how the 'test' is set up this this year and frankly I don't care anymore. The results speak for themselves: it's bogus again. There are other things like the 22,000 Linux users. Last year there were 100,000 RB users over all we were told. It would surprise me if there were really that many Linux users out there then this year. Remember Linux has only 1% market share as an operating system. I figure all you have to do to be an RB user nowadays is download the free Linux version and give it _one_ whirl. (Last year we got to 100,000 users total with free Linux Standard Licenses _and_ free Windows Standard Licenses, and probably counting in a whole number of people who hadn't updated for ages.) How you spin the number of users isn't that much of an issue to me compared to misrepresenting the product you sell though. It's nice to hear the first quarter of 2007 was the highest in the history of the company. To me this means people really wanted the UB support and therefore that most RS customers still really care about Mac compatibility, and thus that RS should remain Mac-focused. It probably means as well that users who didn't upgrade in quite a while finally bit the bullet now, therefore that the user base remains rather loyal to the product over the long term. What puzzles me is that amid the 'feel good' news of increasing sales and overseas expansion, the reality here on the NUG is that there are far less messages than there used to be. I never hang out on the forums so I don't know if these compensate it, but the dwindling community on the NUG suggests a lower rate of interest in the product, quite the opposite of what was pictured at the keynote. Another area of concern is that the RS engineers seem to be swamped more than ever. It takes ages now for a bug report to even be reviewed. This too makes me imagine an ever struggling RS rather than a happily expanding RS... (Or is it just because they switched the feedback system to REAL SQL Server? --just teasing. ;-) Only 2 cents, not worth flame wars, Marc PS: It could be interesting to see whether over the period that the number of e-mails on the NUG decreased, activity on the forums increased with the same amount. (And for those amongst you who who easily give in to panic attacks, I don't believe RS is going to go belly up. The above just means that this might still be a rougher period for the company than they'd want you to believe. For instance, given the rapid release model which includes free upgrades and the high sales in the first quarter, they must have sold close to nothing in the second quarter this year. I just wanted to put things in perspective, nothing more.) _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe or switch delivery mode: <http://www.realsoftware.com/support/listmanager/> Search the archives: <http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/lists.html>
