Hi, John --

and Happy (if freezing) New Year to you, too. Sounds like all of Europe and large swaths of Asia are in the grips of the kind of winter we used to have in the good old days of last Millenium. Some of my friends in Finland are ecstatic right now, because they can drive their heavy equipment right over the lakes and cut out tens of kilometers of driving in the process. The others, not so, because this year they have to drill a much deeper hole into the ice when they go ice fishing...

I find it funny that a health care official would be talking about a program called MUMPS :-) No mention of MEASLES, though?

I assume that you know something about the "certain company" that I don't, as I sure have been unimpressed by the quality, if not the quantity, of their efforts lately (as in the last year or so.)

Cheers!

Pertti


>Hello Perti,
>
>Happy New Year!
>
>I'm having a barrel of laughs in London in the snow and thought I'd pass on what I'm seeing here.
>
>A very senior health person has told me that she is not particularly interested in language or MS vs Open Source, she is interested in functionality. Period.
>
>Proof? She tells me that two very large regional deals have been struck by a company promoting Cache, the odd-ball successor of an old MUMPS system that was effectively defunct some years back. Cache is way out of favor with the cool crowd, but in the real world it drives some impressive technology, including at least one of the largest and best-respected healthcare IT companies in the US that uses Cache exclusively.
>
>My point is that all this talk about customers shying away from languages etc etc may be true for those who charge by the hour, but it's not the only reality and the story about "corporate" disinterest is not universal.
>
>I'd agree that abig issue for VFP is that it does not have any sort of vendor supporting it, and has not had for many years. It has had some great proponents inside MS who have done an amazing job, but MS itself has had its head firmly turned away and even those proponents now are moved on. Therefore VFP needs to be considered as another Open Source offering that is only as strong as its community and a (generally small) group prepared to move it forward.
>
>VFP's difficulty is that MS retains the IP and that we allowed leadership to devolve to a vendor-controlled "MVP" scenario. Apart from a very few standouts, established and nascent VFP leaders have been made MVPs followed by assimilation with opportunities to use more "appropriate" MS technologies. I don't want to say too much, but I'm thinking that a certain company's current "keep under the radar/be un-impressive" non-strategy wrt their VFP offering may be a marvelous thing. ;-)
>
>The other thing VFP lacks is the key proponent. Cache has serious players in government and industry. VFP used to have credible references, but less and less as decisionmakers have become tired of swimming against the tide. They say that only dead fish go with the flow, but only the most vigorous fish are prepared to keep battling this particular current. ;-)