Re: We CAN compete with Microsoft! (and Oracle, by the way...)

I agree absolutely with your feelings about Informix's marketing strategy: but for somewhat different reasons. I have been providing Informix based solutions worldwide for a similar period of time and can remember when it was affordable. For example: about 3 years ago I provided a system for a small startup company of about 5 employees. An unlimited RDS SE run-time licence, together with some devel RDS and SQL came to about '8000 (If the "'" doesn't come out its Pounds sterling!). That same company recently, now nearly 100 strong moved to a 4 processor box and I was aked to do the porting. One of the tasks was clearly to re-licence and I was horrified at the price. OK, the company's now big enough to afford these prices but I am getting quite a lot of resistance from smaller outfits. When we quoted recently for another small start-up customer with a fixed budget we either had to absorb some of the licence costs or, possibly, not get the contract. What we are up against, of course, is the increasing awareness that Billy Gates is more or less giving away NT/SQL Server for a few hundred quid(that's Pounds Sterling again folks!). OK, so there are not many professionals that would recomend this route for big mission critical apps but for smaller outfits its very tempting and affordable. I've done some stuff with VB/SQL Server and I'm not very impressed with the ODBC thing generally. Talking about cost again, I did provide a solution using Informix 7 SE and some Access/VB front ends but the cost of the drivers at '500 per seat wound up with a move eventually to: Yes! NT/SQL Server: my clients just wouldn't pay these prices! So: if Informix's gate keepers are listening then why not re-align the marketing strategy along the, I hate to say it, Microsoft strategy by which I mean keep the development products cheap to encourage development in the environment; and keep down run time costs to allow the inexpensively developed apps to proliferate! Cheers! -- Richard Lailey