I think there are two other factors that come into play: technology and marketing.
I know of at least one site here in the UK who are committed to moving to SAP because they believed for a long time that UV was a dead platform. Why? Because for years they heard nothing to the contrary. They now know that is not the case, but it's too late: they've spent the dollars and they are committed to move. There are some great VADs and ISVs out there, but equally it's inevitable that there will be some channels that are uncommunicative and unresponsive - you'll get that in any industry. But since IBM's policy (outside the US at least) is to sell via VAD or ISV, if you're stuck with one of them that's bound to colour your view of the technology. Organizations like U2UG are there to try to counter these impressions, but sometimes it feels like swimming against the tide. The second issue is the growth of technology that fools people into thinking that it can solve business problems for them, and thereby lowers the appreciation of the need to develop proper skill sets. Take Visual Studio for example: you can build applications at rapid pace using drag and drop to data bind to SQL data sources. Job done. Of course, anyone with any experience of writing real SQL based applications would freak at the lousy job the wizards do in automatically generating update statements, would despair at the lack of proper concurrency control, will steer away from the ugly datasets that scatter validation all over the shop.. but developers raised on these technologies are given the impression that the technology will do it all for them and so simply don't know any better. (And don't even start me on BizTalk..) Now, don't get me wrong. I like Visual Studio, I like C# and I use it on a daily basis. But like most on this list I've been around long enough to recognize at least some of its limitations, and the no-go areas for real world applications. I'll also admit the first client/sever applications I wrote were awful: luckily I have been fortunate enough to be able to learn from them. With the speed of new technology emerging, new markets offering cheap labour and the latest solve-all-your-problems wizardry always jumping at you, I wonder whether these new developers are getting that chance. However much I hate it, having been raised on ugly green screens and long winded hand coding at least gives a sense of the real work involved. Now we are coming towards the time when 'real' programmers - the people who taught many of us - are retired and it's that kind of perspective that is in danger of being lost. Brian ------- u2-users mailing list u2-users@listserver.u2ug.org To unsubscribe please visit http://listserver.u2ug.org/
