Re: Future of Informix

mehrani@worldnet.att.net wrote: :So much said yet so much unclear. :So is Informix is stong enough to live through these problems about :employees going to Oracle? That's but a minor ripple compared to the problems resulting from thei sales slump the last quarter. I don't think the defecting emploiees will have any significant effect on Informix. : Are they going to continue to be no.2 or they :are going to fade away as Oracle and MS take more and more of the :market. Any ideas? You are right in defining Oracle and MS as the major competitors. Oracle at the high end, MS coming up from below. The MS position is a dangerous one for anybody in the database industry. Whatever problems they may currently have with their products, both OS and DB engine, can and probably will be solved. Informix does however have the best position by far from a technological point of view. If they can sell their current products for another half year or so, and then fase in the Universal Server as their only database engine and understand that they must sell it at prices comparable with the competition they can not only survive, but grow very substantially. They will have to understand that the Universal Server can't be sold at a higher price than the competition although it has much better functionality. Nobody in this industry was ever successful by charging higher prices. It's generaly volume that has created success. To achieve that Informix also have some work to do to make their engines easy to use and manage, but that shouldn't be too hard. Nils.Myklebust@idg.no NM Data AS, P.O.Box 9090 Gronland, N-0133 Oslo, Norway My opinions are those of my company The Informix FAQ is at http://www.iiug.org