Re: Informix's Official NewEra Three Year Plan

Ken writes: >Our CEO (and most of the executive staff -- Jeff Hudson included) is, by >necessity, operationally removed from the day-to-day decision making >process about the management of products. By this statement, I take it to mean you work for Informix. No offense, but this statement is patently absurd. Jeff Hudson and the other officers are, in fact, intimately involved with the decision-making process that ultimately drive the day-to-day decisions. It is at that very level that decisions such as 'do we cut further NewEra development' get made. Product managers don't tell the CEO that he can't cut a product - it's the other way around. And it HAS happened before (remember products like SmartWare, and WingZ?). >No... all three releases are listed as maintenance releases, though >there are some specific items that are going into the Q1 release. Just >because it is maintenance, doesn't mean that new functionality cannot be >added to it. If you need specific items added to the base product or >enhanced, then they are going to have to be requested. Do you have ANY idea how long some feature requests have sat in frdb without any action being taken on them? And I refer to features that a lot of customers were looking for. And I have to point out that a product in maintenance mode by definition is not targeted to receive new functionality. The WHOLE POINT of maintenance mode is to reduce the amount of effort spent on a product to as close to zero as possible. The ultimate goal is to continue to generate revenue from the product without infusing significant development funds. How many new (major) features have made it in to 4gl since it went into maint. mode? (Jonathan, can you comment?) And that is a product that is still generating a significant amount of revenue. >1. Allow the user community to drive the enhancement process in an >organized fashion. Have Informix build the products you want to use the >first (second?) time. Sadly, there is little precedent for this at Informix. >2. Give Informix an idea of how many customers the proposed >changes/additions are important to. It's easier to justify an upgrade >request when you can say that a majority of the current installed base >are pulling for something. Again, historically Informix has not reacted to even overwhelming sentiment from the user community, at least not in what one could consider a timely fashion. What you really need to drive features is to have big partners, e.g. SAP, request (or even demand) certain features. Historically, that HAS gotten the desired results. >Isn't that already the case??? Fact of the matter is that engine sales >are the companies "life blood". It has been that way as long as I can >remember. Then your memory is limited. Once upon a time (say from 88 to maybe 93 or so) tools and engines were about 50/50 in terms of revenue generation. Of course in those days, you got a copy of SE with most of the tools, so the measurement was probably skewed as a result. Still, it wasn't until the introduction of OnLine that the engines started to overtake the tools in a big way (and for a long time, the #1 Informix "product" was CISAM, owing to its being embedded in a lot of products sold by various s/w companies). >Products of consequence to a company rarely disappear. When they do, it >has been my observation that it was probably best for the user community >and for the vendor. I don't believe that this is the case with NewEra or >with 4GL. "They" also said that NewEra was the replacement for 4GL... I >didn't believe that either. I think that it was a classic case of >comparing apples-to-oranges. "Best for the user community" is rather arguable, though "best for the vendor" is right on the money. When 4gl fails to produce enough revenue to justify the costs of support, Informix will drop it like a bug-covered rock. The difficulty with NewEra is that so much money has already gone into it, they don't want to drop it without recouping as much as possible. Main. mode is the ideal solution for that. And NewEra DID start its life as a replacement for 4gl - it's original name was 4gl++ after all. However it went through many design iterations, some better, some worse, before landing where it is today. The original intent was to be 100% compatible with existing 4gl code. What a great idea, eh? An easy migration path from 4gl. But various parties had their say and for better or worse decided to abandon that objective, leaving a product that was not particularly palatable for existing 4gl customers (owing to the recoding costs), and had to compete with numerous products that were at the least cheaper. It is, or should be, absolutely NO surprise to anyone that NewEra was not the runaway success that 4gl was. -- Dave "That's just my opinion - I could be wrong." - Dennis Miller