[SGVLUG] A small company's view of the [pc] world... (Was: QCReports demo)

[Tom Emerson]

Greetings -- I'd like to forward to the group the beginnings of an e-mail I found on another list to bring about some "lively discussion" [Wirt -- feel free to join this e-mail list and defend your views or consider other viewpoints ;) ] [everyone else: you can consider joining the HP3000 list as well and post your comments/concerns there -- that list is very much like this one, only worldwide :) -- it even has it's own set of "colorful characters" whom you can set into violent posting mode with the simplest of messages...]  

As you can see, the author of this program has a very small user base -- 500 clients or so.  He made a decision to port this to a "PC" because he didn't want to get stuck "with a single server vendor" again [i.e., Hewlett Packard and their HP3000 line] -- I'll let you read the rest of his reasoning, then open this up for discussion on "did he make the right choice?" [ok, that's kind of biased as I'm sending this to a Linux advocacy group ;)]  

THERE IS ONE MAJOR GROUND RULE: there shall be no "personal attacks" along the lines of "what an IDIOT this guy must be..." -- I can guarantee you that this is one smart cookie as they say.  This somewhat implies a secondary ground rule -- don't harass the guy on his decision -- he made his decision based on factors that were important to him, and there is a non-zero possibility that the decision he made was "best" for him and his circumstances.

----- Forwarded Message ----
From: Wirt Atmar <atmar at AICS-RESEARCH.COM>
To: HP3000-L at RAVEN.UTC.EDU
Sent: Sunday, March 30, 2008 3:06:21 PM
Subject: [HP3000-L] <plug> QCReports demo

When HP killed the HP3000 in 2001 we had about 500 customers for 
QueryCalc, the graphics report writer we'd written for IMAGE and the HP3000. 
The first question I asked myself wasn't what do we do now? Rather it was, if 
we were going to rebuild QueryCalc, who do I trust?

After a few days thought, I decided that the only person I truly trusted any 
longer to maintain his platform was Bill Gates. Backend servers have now 
become interchangeable and unidentifiable, thus I certainly didn't want to 
become too entangled with any single server vendor again. But the PCs are 
obviously different. Although there are an enormous number of PC 
manufacturers, there's really only one system, and I very much believe in Bill's 
plans for World Domination. Because of that belief, the newest version of 
QueryCalc, which we now call QCReports, was translated onto the PC.


[snipped the rest -- basically it goes on to describe how it works on a PC]