Re: IIUG - New engine survey, your input needed

On Wed, 17 Jun 1998 22:12:44 -0400 (EDT), Seth Grimes <grimes@access.digex.net> wrote: > >Clem, I should point out that the trial lawyer's rule "don't ask a >question unless you already know the answer" applies to my notes. > >I'm an Informix user, professional-services subcontractor, and >stockholder. I think that Informix is STILL managing to find lots of >opportunities to harm themselves. There's the confusing multiplicity >of "Dynamic Servers" -- I remember Michael Stonebraker at the '96 >Informix conference criticizing Oracle's "universal server" as being >a grab-bag of engines under a single name, and then Informix >marketing goes and copies pages from Oracle's book This is a little unfair. Marketing have made it into an option to the one engine they market, namly IDS. Remember new customers will typically not know about the fact that it still is a separate engine. They will find out when they start asking the right questions of course, but that's the type of conflicts that any reasonably good salesperson should be able to handle. Of course they have to work hard on removing this conflict, which they seem to be doing now. > -- and there's >the message sent by making only 7.30 available free to developers >that 9.1x still isn't good enough or important enough. This message is however received strong an clear by me, and I would believe from many others in the market as well. This is the part that Informix must realy fix and fix fast. They wouldn't necessarily have to give away 9.1x on their NT development offer right now if they think it's too complex in some way, but they should have made it much more clear what it would take to get 9.1x. As it is now you actually have to be interested enough to ask a salesperson. They don't seem to understand what kind of barrier that is as opposed to having that information clearly stated on their web site. Of course if there are no complexity issues, things that don't work as well as they should or other kinds of problems, they should have promoted 9.1x heavily as the engine to develop for. As they don't I conclude there must be some kind of problem. If the only problem is in the marketing department it's too sad for Informix. Nils Myklebust NM Data AS Norway E-mail: Nils.Myklebust@nmdata.com FAQ at: http://www.iiug.org/techinfo/faq/faq_top.html (Now with ODBC info under "Third party products".)