On Jan 26, 7:04 am, Tony Gravagno
<g6q3x9lu53... (AT) sneakemail (DOT) com.invalid> wrote:

So Tony - what do you think IBM will do with it ? package it up
differently I presume, but they have the source, will there be some
interesting improvements coming out of Denver ?


Rgds
Symeon.

Symeon wrote:
<snip>

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(bottom posting 'cause this is usenet, not google groups, )


--
Allen Egerton
aegerton at pobox dot com

"Symeon" wrote:
I'm guessing we'll see the same thing we always do with these sorts of
deals - incompatibilities bundled at a competitive cost, enough to
confuse people about which vendor they will buy from, but expecting
that the bigger guys are going to naturally be better. Though I see
opportunities for companies like mine that already have expertise with
the software, that's one of the things I'm dreading.

I'm not just attracted to the mv.NET software. I've been exceedingly
impressed with BlueFinity as a support provider and as a good "upline"
company to do business with. They fix confirmed issues in a
reasonable amount of time and add enhancements quickly and eagerly,
the way any one of us in this Pick market would. From what I
understand of IBM development cycles and support, I'm concerned that
their flavor will have longer cycles between changes and an altogether
different atmosphere of support. I'm hoping that people will continue
to see BlueFinity, and the personal service from Nebula R&D, as a
compelling reason to continue coming to us for product and services.

When it comes to .NET, I really don't hear people in this market
asking for improvements for mv.NET or anything else, so enhancements
probably won't define the IBM offering. mv.NET is extremely rich
compared to UO and UO.NET but there are still lots of sites committed
to those libraries. I think one of the attractions as usual is that
IBM is a big company that will support their products, so limited or
not, people have gone with UO and UO.NET. Another attraction for UO
and UO.NET is that they're free. People don't want features, they
want cheap development tools. It will be interesting to see what IBM
does for pricing.

While the motivation for this deal probably wasn't to improve the
software, I think IBM wants their client base to move forward with
..NET techology. They probably realized the limitations in the UO
libraries and were faced with the "make or buy" decision, "buy" being
a better option in this case.

mv.NET currently supports almost all of the MV platforms, including
older varieties like AP, mvBASE, and mvEnterprise. This is important
for a developer who wants a cross-platform solution, but this is
completely at odds with the IBM desire to keep people exclusively
bound to U2. Like RD with PDP.NET, I'm concerned that the IBM version
will not have the same platform independence, and that the libraries
will change just enough to make it difficult for someone to migrate to
the BlueFinity mv.NET if/when they decide to deploy to another DBMS.
This will probably just mean more code to check in a migration, and
thus more costly migrations, but probably less painful than migrating
from PDP.NET or UO.NET.

On the other side of the coin, it's also possible that IBM and
BlueFinity will share code, allowing the development of both products
to be accellerated and for all of us to benefit from the new
arrangement. We just won't know until it happens.

Tony
TG@ removethisNebula-RnD.com