Use of Microsoft products in your shop?

[Guest.Visitor]

Use of Microsoft products in your shop?

I'd stay as far away from Corel as possible. Their stock is at an all-time low and it's likely they're not long for this world. Microsoft has a sizable investment in Corel and will probably scoop the rest up at bargain prices to eliminate WP from the world.

Star Office, being free, doesn't do much for Sun's bottom line. I certainly can't imagine it's a high priority on the list of things for Scott McNeely to do. He's already spending a fortune supporting Java with no return, why support more? Scott McNeely's business plan is based upon one item: Get Bill Gates. Sooner or later, maybe sooner with this slow economy, the shareholders at Sun will be clambering for the jettison of product lines that don't support the bottom line. Scott's hada free hand up to now, but eventually his business plan will catch up to him. Linux has done more to damage Sun and HP than it will ever do to damage Microsoft. Most Linux users are MS haters to begin with and already used some form of Unix. They're switching from legacy Unix to Linux big time.

That leaves Lotus. Unfortunately, Lotus is to IBM as the AS/400 is to IBM. IBM doesn't seem to give it much support nor do they promote it. IBM has stated very clearly that "services"is their future.

So, where does that leave us? One dominant and 3 also rans. Looks likea scenario that says "stay where you are for a while and see what pans out."

chuck

Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of my employer.

"KCM2" <KCM2@forums.midrangecomputing.com> wrote in message news:1ece3638.14@WebX.WawyahGHajS...

XP is signaling to me it's time to look at changing buses. In the next 3-6 months we will be evaluating a switch from M$. What are the three leading office suites in terms of MKT share? (excluding M$) Of the three, rank in feature richness/ability to replace M$. Rank the three in future MKT share 3 years from now. These seem to be the questions we all will want to know. The three players seem to be: Lotus Smart Suite, COREL WordPerfect Office, and Star Office. If there are any PC mag shootouts of these three could someone let me know the name and date? Tx

[R.Daugherty]

Use of Microsoft products in your shop?

lol, so that's why I never saw a Caddilac in the 70's... between that and that copycat styling GM used that made everything look the same, maybe I saw one and didn't know it... Ralph

[R.Daugherty]

Use of Microsoft products in your shop?

Hi KCM2, Other than the normal shootout comparisons, I can throw this in the mix. StarOffice is undergoing a compentized rewrite (Windows and Linux) in the soon to be forthcoming version 6.0. One of the issues that someone may have with 5.2 is the loading of the entire environment rather than pieces. If that's an issue, it goes away. The main reason for Corel to support the Wine (Windows programs running against equivalent natice Linux API's) was to have their office suite cross platform on Windows and Linux. I read a vague reference that it was mostly there, or is there, but never saw a grand announcement. I would look for this suite to be cross platform in the traditional word processing, speadsheet, and presentation programs (albeit M$ format compatible - WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, and whatever the Powerpoint competitor). Lotus was one of those initial rewrite in Java disasters before they retreated to lick their wounds. Still, they have a substantial amount of work in Java office components. Ralph

[R.Daugherty]

Use of Microsoft products in your shop?

Chuck wrote: "Microsoft has a sizable investment in Corel and will probably scoop the rest up at bargain prices to eliminate WP from the world." While the warning against Corel is valid, Chuck, Microsoft is under a microscope from here on out in eliminating anymore competition. It won't happen. They did derail ongoing work to make it and other Windows program work under Linux with that investment, but the stated reason for the investment is to have Corel take their software and participate in the .Net architecture, so it's not going away for a number of reasons and in fact will not be sitting still either as it gets ported to .Net. Ralph

[Guest.Visitor]

Use of Microsoft products in your shop?

Ralph,

Don't kid yourself...Any "threat" of action by the government has not deterred MS up to this point. The only thing that will actually deter their efforts will be an enforceable governmental decree. And, once any decree is issued, it'll be in the courts for years, maybe a decadebefore it's enforceable, if ever. The MS lawyers know their stuff, they can delay and deter almost forever. Or until Justice drops the case as they did with IBM. MS learned from the best at anti-trust cases: IBM.

chuck

Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of my employer.

"Ralph Daugherty" <Ralph_Daugherty@forums.midrangecomputing.com> wrote in message news:1ece3638.18@WebX.WawyahGHajS...

Chuck wrote: "Microsoft has a sizable investment in Corel and will probably scoop the rest up at bargain prices to eliminate WP from the world." While the warning against Corel is valid, Chuck, Microsoft is under a microscope from here on out in eliminating anymore competition. It won't happen. They did derail ongoing work to make it and other Windows program work under Linux with that investment, but the stated reason for the investment is to have Corel take their software and participate in the .Net architecture, so it's not going away for a number of reasons and in fact will not be sitting still either as it gets ported to .Net. Ralph

[R.Daugherty]

Use of Microsoft products in your shop?

If protecting Corel WordPerfet Office from being taken off the market by Microsoft with enough investment in Corel to persuade them to do that was in the realm of the anti-trust suit, then you'd have a point, but it woulld be taken care of with standard anti-trust review and approval from DOJ, which has already stopped M$ from taking Quicken and is monitoring this investment in Corel. The DOJ anti-trust unit will not approve M$ getting control of Corel and removing the Office competitor from the market. The investment was seen in the light of the investment in Apple, an investment to bolster a company that strengthened the market for M$ products (Office in Apple's case, .Net in Corel's case). Any investment which lessens that competition will not be approved by DOJ. This is above and beyond current anti-trust suit and is not negotiable by M$. As for current suit, you're probably right, unfortunately. Ralph

[Guest.Visitor]

Use of Microsoft products in your shop?

Personally, I think it's kinda funny to watch the passionate anti Microsoft faction (as well as the religious-like as/400 faction). From a programmer/developer perspective, it looks like the world will be divided equally among CORBA/JAVA/UNIX and .NET/C#/WINDOWS. I don't know which paradigm is better (and really don't care). I'm more interested in positioning myself in a place where my opportunities can reflect the reality of what's happening. Being a green screen/RPG programmer just doesn't appear to have much of a future.

[R.Daugherty]

Use of Microsoft products in your shop?

Mike wrote: "Being a green screen/RPG programmer just doesn't appear to have much of a future." I'm curious. I wonder what the programming distribution is with following matrix: Projected 5 years ago Projected 2 years ago # employed Current # wanted Projected 2 years out Projected 5 years out I'll bet it's safe to say that there are far more RPG and far less Java than was ever projected. I'll also bet the current projections for the future are just as worthless. I think the number of programmers projected to go into ERP languages has been consistently underestimated. C++, Java, and RPG get all the talk, but the percentage still done in COBOL or now in ERP languages and SQL (ok, fine, Java holds some SQL in triggers, whoopee, that's still SQL) are the governing factors. I'd say throw in a healthy dose of businesses now able to run on unmodified packaged software on Unix and Windows, a couple of hundred thousand dot commers who don't know much else beyond HTML and Javascript on the street (and therefore removing this category as a potential job opportunity), and now a new wave of big consulting firms throwing veteran ERP people out in the street, and I'd say we RPG programmers on the AS/400 in relatively good shape. The cost effectiveness of our software and our talents as a business programming force is a proven. Companies aren't going to pay for a rewrite in Java no matter what some programmer wants for his career enhancement, but integration with productivity software, data warehousing/mining, and quite frankly getting off our duffs and actually using the capabilities of 5250 that are there (color, mouse, menuing, windowing, and invoking some type of interface separation with EXFMT or dataq's with a move to consolidating business logic in service programs or dataq servers over time to consistently support green screen, batch, and GUI interfaces from same code, using the new Java to RPG calls to create business classes invoked from RPG and back, and getting consistent support throughout the AS/400 industry for ad hoc reporting and drill down against native AS/400 files with something that's based on Office reporting tools) are things that we should do as an industry before we dimiss "green screen" as not as productive as a Windows form or a web page. Ralph

[Guest.Visitor]

Use of Microsoft products in your shop?

Gee Ralph, you must be employed and happy and haven't had to look for any opportunities lately. I don't know what city you are in, but, here in Phoenix, there has been exactly 4 ads for AS/400 work (1 was for an operator) since the beginning of the year. In the past, there was at least 20 a week. On the contract side, you're considered extremely lucky if you are currently billing on an AS/400 project. The cry and hue for IT talent in Phoenix is: Java, Java, C++, HTML, XML, Visual Basic, COBOL (which should give RPG'ers some hope) and more Java. ...and it's not coming from AS/400 shops. The gallows humor hope around here is for "an AS/400 conversion to something else" project. I'm not sure what you mean by being in good shape.

[R.Daugherty]

Use of Microsoft products in your shop?

"I'm not sure what you mean by being in good shape." Well, I said relatively, compared to the some of the other disciplines that are being decimated. I've commented in the past a few times on the loss of jobs, almost the total loss of them, which gets me ticked off at IBM every day. We used to have a lot of RPG ads in the paper every Sunday here in Columbus, OH, but I quit reading the ads a while back when it was apparent that there are no more ads for RPG anymore (except for the obvious parasites hoping to make a few bucks moving bodies). There was none in Seattle last year when I was there. There were not very many for the entire Southwest and Northeast, and anybody that does advertise explicitly doesn't want to deal with relocating. There's obviously more than enough locals with RPG wherever you go except in rural locations. We have some very large retail/wholesale companies in Columbus that run Fortune 60 to 200 or so type companies on several of the largest AS/400's each. I've worked (and still am) at a couple of them, and there is more work than can be handled, but hiring has come to a halt almost everywhere as far as I know. I guess I was talking somewhat about delivering apps inhouse that keep the folks from needing to look at Oracle and elsewhere. I think I said, though, that I don't see how new accounts will be sold. I don't see where new AS/400 RPG programming jobs will come. But I'm not sold that Java or the major ERP's have delivered yet for the money that was put into them, and that cost effective managers will see the value of their RPG code base, especially if we're sprucing it up with better interfaces and integration in the meantime. But it's apps that count. The AS/400 used to have the vertical apps that counted, and now Unix does. So IBM takes one whack after another at running Unix on the AS/400 (three of them actually, POSIX, PASE, and Linux), so we might as well hang it up, admit that IBM gave up on OS/400 because it couldn't sell it anymore (granted, it thinks OS/400 and MVS are wrappers around Unix, one for serious shops and one the merry go round kids, but high priced wrappers to make it convenient to deal with Unix nonetheless), and figure out how to make a living with something not spelled IBM. One may think Java, but that's bs. It's C++. Problem is, it's not a business language and we're specialists at delivering business solutions. So our thinking in RPG just doesn't translate well, in my opinion, which makes it such a pain. Forget the OO that they'll tell you is the reason, it's the pointer oriented code like I used to write in assembler. So Java doesn't have pointers and therfore much more straightforward, but the software out there is being written in C++. What does that mean? I think people are spending more time writing interfaces, visual and otherwise, and the really important stuff is relegated to some hokey SQL statements and the resulting lame architectures. I don't know, but the way things are going I'm sure I'll find out soon. IBM could, on the other hand, recognize that OS/400 is a uniquely gifted operating system and put the XML based interface on it that I wrote up in IMHO articles last year, and unabashedly have a computer with a superior interface to either XWindows or Windows in terms of the right combination of client and server and performance. But like I say, I bought Kylix to generate XWindows apps on Linux, which gives you some idea of my thoughts on that chance. Ralph

[Guest.Visitor]

Use of Microsoft products in your shop?

Frank,

At the company I currently work for we standardize on MS Office, Exchange Server and IIS for web hosting (look at www.lampsplus.com). However, there is a variety of legacy products scattered about such as WP and Lotus that hasn't been brought up to the corporate standard due to lack of resources available. We're attacking those as we do PM on those machines.

I'm a STRONG believer in usingMS Office for three reasons.

1. A standard, homogeneous deployment of software on the desktop is a must if you have limited resources to support the desktop. And, if you have unlimited resources let me know, I want to work there. It's very expensive and difficult to support an environment where the users are permitted to select what softwarethey want to use.I just can't afford to have a Word expert and an Ami Pro expert and aWP expert.

This also includes hardware. Can you imagine the nightmare if we let users choose the printer they want. We'd have to stock dozens of different brands of inkjet and toner cartridges. Whew, what a nightmare. I only have 11 computer support personnel on my staff and it's hard enough keeping up with 3 different HP Laserjets and 3 different HP inkjets. So a standard keeps costs down.

2. Standardizing on MS Office reduces total cost of ownership even more. The initial cost for software may be higher, but the total cost is lower. Why? Because when we need to hire personnel, it's easier to get those who know Word and Excel than some other obscure product. Same with temporary employees. When we need to find tools or add-on products that enhance the office environment we have a much greater success with add-ons for Office. Total cost of ownership models for MS Office and AS/400 are very similar. Higher cost of entry but, eventually, lower total cost of ownership.

3. Because we put such a heavy investment in training into software, I want to pick software that be around for a long time. While I can't always predict the future, I can say that MS Office will be here for a long time. I can't say that with the same degree of confidence about StarOffice, or other products. When you pick oddball products (or worse yet, let end users pick the products) you end up with a bunch of legacy trouble. One guy picks Delphi, another picks Clarion, yet another picks Foxpro. That's not a pretty picture.

As to MS Access, I believe it has its place within an organization. We actually use it to store all of the products on our web page (see url above). It holds thousands of products and serves them up quickly and without problem.

I'm not as thrilled about end users creating complex databases in Access for3 reasons.

1) Security in Access is a pain.

2) Multi-user projects in Access are a REAL pain (I've lived through that.)

3) Access is a desktop database. By that I mean that anytime a user opens up a table or an alternate view, the entire table is manipulated on the client machine. So, if the table is on a server, it's copied in its entirety to the client machine before selections are made. This can but a heavy burden on the network for a large database with many users. It just wasn't meant to do that. I'd much rather do that in DB2/400 or SQL Server.

As you can see, I'm in management. I think about things like costs and support. The most important thing to remember, when all is said and done, is that these are tools, NOT RELIGIONS. For some reason, there are those that will argue against MS simply because they dislike Bill Gates or dislike their company. Those people are the same ones that will argue Ford vs. Chevy. Cars, like software products are just tools. Buy the best one for the job. But, do your research first, don't switch paths every year.

Function should always prevail over form.

chuck

Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of my employer.

"Frank Whittemore" <Frank_Whittemore@forums.midrangecomputing.com> wrote in message news:1ec1d075.33@WebX.WawyahGHajS...

Chuck - Having jumped into this fray, please let us know to what extent Microsoft products have penetrated your shop. What is the status of Word, Outlook, Excel and Access?

[Guest.Visitor]

Use of Microsoft products in your shop?

Ralph, We all know what the AS400 needs better than the smucks trying to sell it. Most of these guys (IBM'ers) have never had to develope and support crap to business end users. The game isn't over (Look @ Apple still hanging on..) it just needs help from people like us to come up with the Top Ten most needed changes. Then these must be understood by IBM and acted upon. Your interface idea is spot on. Another point I would like to make is the same one Sun's Cheif just ranted on about. Information Fragmentation. IBM should be sprinting to make DB2 universal exactly what it's name implies and it should be running on the 400, 6000, etc..