Rebuttle to PC Week Article on Oracle

I am posting the following for Dewey Allen of Price Waterhouse. Mr. Allen was recently "quoted" in PC Week in an article about Oracle Forms 4.0.

Mr. Allen can be reached via E-Mail _at_ Dewey_Allen_at_notes.pw.com

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February 3, 1994

Mr. John Dodge
Executive Editor/News
PC Week
10 Presidents Landing
Medford, MA 02155

Dear Mr. Dodge:

PC Week's January 31 article, "Forms 4.0 plight hampers Oracle's client/server plan" by Mary Jo Foley contains statements attributed to me during a phone interview conducted by Ms. Foley on Thursday, January 27, which are incorrect and inaccurate and which misrepresent my views. Equally as important, these misstatements were used to support what I believe is a highly biased and inaccurate representation of Oracle's Forms 4.0 for Windows 3.1 product. In my professional opinion, Oracle's Forms 4.0 product is a today a strong and viable client/server GUI development tool. The current 4.0.12 release is fully capable of supporting both development and deployment of large scale, mission critical applications.

Concerning the "performance" issues, I also stated to Ms. Foley that Oracle's Forms 4.0 database interface performance was, in my opinion, better than all competitive tools currently on the market. The performance issues that were discussed were limited to user interface elements.

During the telephone interview, I never made the statement that "forms sometimes crashes for no reason." I did state that we had experienced intermittment crashes with releases of Forms 4.0 up through and including the initial production release (v4.0.11). Throughout our beta testing of Forms 4.0 and continuing today for production releases, Oracle's World Wide Support organization has provided Price Waterhouse with timely and effective technical support for Forms 4.0. Oracle has corrected the vast majority of all "bugs" identified in each releases.

The most damning sentence, "The problems, he said, have prevented Price Waterhouse from attempting to deploy mission-critical applications based on the product" was a completely inaccurate statement. Price Waterhouse customer projects using Forms 4.0 are still in the design / construction / testing phases. That these development projects have not yet been deployed is not a function of the stability and performance of Oracle's Forms 4.0 software. It is a function of the complexity of the mission critical business applications being developed by our customers.

Database connectivity is not an issue to Price Waterhouse's customers. Our customers are uniformly using Oracle's Forms 4.0 to develop applications against Oracle7 databases.   

At the end of the half hour interview, I asked Ms. Foley to provide me, before publication, with the specific quotes that she planned to attribute to me in her article. I provided her with my Internet E-mail address to facilitate this request. Ms. Foley agreed to my request but did honor our agreement. She left me a voice message after close of business (EST) on the 27th with para-phrased and garbled quotes. I returned her call the next day, January 28th, stating that I did not agree with these "quotes". She again left me a voice message after close of business on the 28th stating that the article had already gone to print.

I am very disappointed that, in the end, my views were misrepresented, my statements twisted and inaccurately presented to support a position with which I fundamentally disagree. I believe that the principles of journalistic fairness and accuracy require that you print a correction which presents my views fairly and accurately.

Sincerely,

D. Dewey Allen

Senior Manager
Price Waterhouse
National IT Technical Services Organization 6500 Rock Spring Drive
Bethesda, MD 20817
Dewey_Allen_at_notes.pw.com

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