Re: Looks Like The Party Is Over In Menlo (2nd try)

"Tim Schaefer" <tschaefe@bellsouth.net> wrote: > smooth1 wrote: ( Who I think is David Williams ) > > Informix 9 is still here (and 7+9 are finally getting completely > > merged). > > > > So what, big deal. Without customers these will fit > nicely in a museum somewhere. [...] get distracted by the Ardent > data base engines, like they did with Red Brick and > Cloudscrape. Just what Informix needs, more data base > engines. [...] > > Now there is the i.Sell,i.Reach, Media Server appearing to use > > blades to provide quick to build solutions... I have to agree with Tim. I've been using Informix products since 1991 as a rather specialized developer/researcher, using clients' copies of the software, so I had never bought it for myself. I recently went out to buy Informix software for my own server. I was disconcerted by the inability of either the Web site or the sales staff to explain which product did what. Why the heck should I buy i.Sell, i.Reach, or whatever the next i.something is, when what I want is just a product that works without too much fiddling around? Anything you need to do should be quickly doable by the basic engine and its associated package of tools. As far as I can tell, the blades do not provide "quick to use solutions", they provide another software package that you have to get working on top of the engine. Do you really want lots of layers of software, each with its own bugs, and each with its own manual and quirks that you need to look through to get it to be crash resistant? No. Not to mention that the Informix user pool is using so many different Informix products and engines these days that it's harder to get user-to-user technical support. I always figured that Informix could get away with making their product list incomprehensible to someone like me because I was just a small fry individual developer (using Linux now, too) and that their real market was in bigger businesses, who could apparently interpret the flow of buzzwords that described what Informix was trying to do. But the people I know who use Informix use it because it's cheaper than Oracle. Why would any large business that's relatively unconcerned with the cost of basic software poke around with Cloudscape, Red Brick, Ardent, or any of the Informix i.sell.more.software things when they could just buy Oracle? Oracle and the various Informix products seem to work about equally well, and Oracle has a much larger base.