Software-on-demand and small businesses
Frank has a post talking about why small businesses don't get the concept of "software on demand". My perspective is that small businesses don't want software on demand. One argument put forward by Frank is that small businesses have minimal IT staff therefore they should welcome a third-party company who is prepared to look after the IT issues of a new system for them. My experience has been small businesses owners feel that they want the same person who currently looks after their IT issues to deal with all of their IT issues. Otherwise, when problems occur, they get stuck in the middle of geek finger pointing and have no clue who to believe. It is also an issue about big fish and little fish. If a small business uses a part time consultant to provide IT support then when something goes wrong, the small company can expect the consultant to respond pretty quickly or risk loosing his customer. When a big hosting company has an outage, the small business is screwed. No amount of screaming will have any effect. I believe that when a small business owner hears about salesforce.com, what the owner hears is... "put all of my business critical sales information on the servers of some dot com survivor 2000 miles away, that I can only access via a web browser, if my internet connection is online and the browser is not rendered unusable by 50 popups per minute." and the next question is usually, "what's wrong with our server?"
So long Classic VB
I feel I have to weigh in to the current debate regarding the end of support of VB6. Many people have stated that they see no reason to move working VB6 applications to the .Net framework. They feel because they are still using VB6 that Microsoft should still support and enhance it. As a vendor of an application that has more than half a million lines of VB6 code, you would think that I might feel the same way. Our application has matured enough at this point that we have found workarounds to the nasty parts of VB6. The last service pack was a major improvement in the stability of the IDE and at this point I don't want anything else to change in the VB6 environment. If people have stable running applications, why would they care if MS are providing support or not? It's not like MS are going rip out all of the knowledge base articles, recall old copies of the MSDN library and ban all further discussion of VB6. Hell, if you really want it bad, you can pay for extended support! We made the decision a few years ago that we were going to rewrite our application to take advantage of the .Net framework. That development is moving along quite nicely and we are really starting to see some major benefits from the new platform. If you have a VB6 application and you see more than a minor amount of modifications on your horizon, I think that you should seriously consider moving to .Net. From what we have seen, the reduction in lines of code to maintain and the increase in overall productivity when developing in .Net will quickly pay for the migration. That being said, you can write crappy software in both VB6 and in .Net, you can just blow a bigger hole in your foot with .Net if you don't know what you are doing! I think that the MVP's have a lot to answer for in a situation like this. They should be the ones embracing the change, recognizing that VB6 has lived a useful life, but the time has come to move on. They should realize that features like inheritance and garbage collection are major steps forward that could not have been bolted on to the existing VB runtime.
I was replaced by a biztalk server
I have to share this gem. This is from the first page of the Biztalk server documentation.