Too many IT chefs in the kitchen!:) If their DOS app is doing a good job I would ask why change.

I had a project at a "software" shop a few years back. The in-house staff were maintenance programmers - great at selecting into a grid - but for detailed work orders - they went out of house. The project needed to allow users of their accounting system to generate charts ( 1 to 4) a page.

I said great - we can use an Excel automation. But that was spooky for one of their staff. He preferred to level the field and make sure everybody was on the same page (if he did not understand a particular solution he would recomend one that no one knew). So he pressed for Minds Eye because it would level the playing field and everyone would be equally ignorant. My question was - excel is free - everyone of "your" customers own an Excel license. Why go there.

So time dragged as he tried to figure out MindsEye - and I used the excuse that I needed to develop parsing routines - and did it in Excel. He eventually learned that Mind's Eye did not have enough of a graphics engine - by then I had finished the Excel automation.

But thats not all - when I forwarded the project phases he was upset because the forms were modeless. They were perfectly synced - regardless of what forms were open the pointers aligned. He wanted them modal. Fortunately, the owner got a taste of it - and he loved it.

Some people need seams (or so it seems:-). Their initial design was an 8 form GUI - I showed them how it could be done with two - and then they gave me some story about how they hired a guy to prototype it. I remember thinking - did the "prototype" geek just finish school? They let me do it in 4! (well - the bos did).

It's all about "powder" on the face. System shop [staff] programmers really get irked when the bos goes out of house to service a work order. Some of those guys had been in the business 10 or 15 years - and their only claim to fame were changes to an FPW app so it could recompile under VFP7. It sill looked like the legacy FPW - it was the FPW app!

They had an oppertunity to really stretch themselves out - and get zinned with VFP 7. It was strange to see people with a lot of potential not grow or challenge themselves.






>Well, I wasn't really interested in writing a app for them...I really don't have time. They just asked me to help get this set up. I do have a product that does a subset of what they need, but it's kind of a one-off deal that would require a lot of work to fit their needs. It's a fat client vfp app, supporting 10 concurrent users with pentium II 200 file server and similarly junky workstations.
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>After seeing Jordan's post, I found a cheaper config...about $6000, so I was definately off the mark there...but still. 6k for a 5 user server?
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>I talked to the folks demanding the hardware, and was told rather snottily that Oracle does "amazing things". What those things are could not be specified, but I was assured that they were amazing. Apparently too amazing for my tiny mind to grasp. I do know that the client does not need "amazing things"...they have been operating for many years on a cruddy old dos app that does the job.
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>This company makes decent, albiet ugly looking software and I have always given them a corresponding recommendation when asked. After this they get the thumbs down.