Re: Powersoft to drop Oracle support?

In article <finkel.15.00B5B566_at_interaccess.com>, finkel_at_interaccess.com (Richard Finkelstein) writes:
> In article <3ebs90$kun_at_kapall.strengur.is> snorri_at_kapall.strengur.is (Snorri Bergmann) writes:
> >From: snorri_at_kapall.strengur.is (Snorri Bergmann)
> >Subject: Re: Powersoft to drop Oracle support?
> >Date: 3 Jan 1995 15:59:28 GMT
>
 

[Stuff deleted]

> >-Snorri.
>
> Hi Snorri.
>
> I am aware of the Gartner Group's and Hurwitz's recommendation on this matter
> and I remain perplexed by their recommendation. When I first approached
> Informix for an evaluation or a "look" at NewEra they declined. Their
> rationale at the time was that NewEra was too difficult for me to understand.

When was this? NewEra Was released in november. In regards to the difficaulty of learning NewEra is the fact that it is fully object-oriented, and if your group has no OO background, yes it might be too difficault for the group to evaluate. If you are an Oracle shop and don't have an Informix engine installed you might not be able to use NewEra for development, only for runtimes. The SE local engine for Windows will ship in the jan-feb timeframe (I think), and will be included with NewEra, so then you will not have any difficaulty of evaluating it.

> This may be true, but if NewEra is too complex for my group to evaluate then
> the product's target market must be minute.
>

Let's put it this way: If Visual Basic is good enough for you and your client/server enterprise, NewEra is *NOT* the tool for you.

> More recently, Informix no longer insists that the product is too complex but
> they still have not come up with a reason that I should not take a look at
> the product. I am awaiting their reason. At this point in time I am still

The reason might be that you don't have an Informix Engine Installed. The next version of NewEra will not have this limit.

> somewhat in the dark, but I do know that the product is not going anywhere and

Belive me, the product is not "not going anywhere". What gives you this feeling? The 2-pages ads in Computerworld? I've been using Informix since 1988 and they have *NEVER* before advertised or emphasized a product in this way.

> that the product has some kind of problem that Informix feels that they do not
> want me to evaluate it. In the past vendors have withheld product from
> evaluation for several reasons, most often because: 1) the product was very
> buggy, or 2) the product had a very long learning curve (much more than
> average) and the vendor thought I could not grasp the nature of the product
> without a major education effort, 3) the product was architecturally flawed
> and the vendor did not want me to analyze it.

1. There are bugs, of course, but during a 5 - day course in NewEra I attended, not a single PC had to be rebooted or a Windows session restarted. (10 PCs).
2. The learning curve is longer than in first-generation tools (PB, O*Forms, VB, Gupta etc.), but if you have the OO background (know C++) then this is a pice of cake.
3. Definately not.

[stuff deleted]

> Whatever the reasons Informix wants to keep their product hidden from
> evaluation, there is certainly no evidence that the product is going anywhere
> and could very likely end up like Wingz - that is an historical footnote.

What evidence do you need? I think you have spoken to much with Oracle salespeople  lately.

> Informix has been a very weak provider of tools in the past - mostly because
> they do not have the marketing, sales, or support staff to sell front-end
> development tools.

Informix has 33% market share in tools on Unix, oracle has <2% (IDC 1993).

> I see no reason to believe that this will change. Now
> challenged by Sybase/Powersoft and in the near future Oracle/Project X, I

I'm a bit off here, I thought CDE2 would be the major tool from Oracle to compete with PB and the likes, Project X to compete with Visual Basic. Are you saying that CDE2 will be thrown away in the near futute? Why did Oracle almost buy Gupta? Surely because they are *WEAK* on the tools side.

> expect Informix to fall futher and further behind in both RDBMS and tools
> marketshare.
>

Well, it seems that Informix is doing pretty well these days, shares are climbing up etc. I have absolutely no fear for this.

> Hope this answers your question. I would be interested in
> any experiences you or others might have with NewEra.

NewEra is a NEW product, and beeing a 1.0 version it's very good. It will have major advantages over other product in the future, look what it has in the 1.0 vesion which NO OTHER (4GL) tool has:

1. Fully Object Oriented. This means you can implement your OO Design 100%. You can use C++ Class libraries.
2. Compiles to p-code AND c-code (.DLL). All other tools use p-code only, which means performance problems. NewEra can generate c-code which is compiled and linked (binary) on the platform in use.

Future stuff like Application Partitioning (Distributed Objects) looks very good, and Oracle has NO strategy in this area. (Except moving a piece of PL/SQL code from the client to database server :-)

Best regards,

• Snorri.