So don't get me wrong. I like Access users. Access developers, in particular, are the anti-IT department, the rebels, the people who aren't willing to wait for the sysadmins to provision them a server, and they don't have to, because they can just share an Access file on the fileserver. IT departments hate them, which is how I know they're on to something. These are the kind of people I want to help. This is the sort of thing that's the reason I do the work that I do. No kidding.
While it feels a little weird hearing that talk in relation to a Microsoft product, I agree. Building and maintaining a successful (To whatever extent you would call such a niche market a "success") product that helps people solve their own problems instead of feeding the IT priesthood would be awesome.
And then when you talk about the implementation details. My smile turns to a horrified slack jaw expression.
I'd probably feel guilty about it, and I might even try to keep it running as long as I could, but I'd eventually have as much as I could take and give up.
True, it's a bit weird to think of a Microsoft product that way - but Access is a special case. Microsoft would dearly love to kill it and get everyone to migrate to MS SQL (and boy, do they push hard in that direction) but there are just too many satisfied users to let it die. So basically there's customer satisfaction in spite of their best efforts :)
> So basically there's customer satisfaction in spite of their best efforts :)
That's funny, because you're in the exact same situation. You sort of wish people would stop using your product so that you could move on to doing something else. But that isn't going to happen because people need what you're offering so badly that they search the web until they find your product. Weather you make that easy for them or not.
Then again a product called "Access" is probably the most likely of any to be a special case.
seems to be very similar to apple's strategy on HyperCard - which apple probably deemed to be too powerful for rapidly writing applications and thus pulled it from the market. maybe this is a common strategy among large IT companies?
I've also noticed the ms sql server management studio to be fairly unintuitive (adding backups as drives, etc.) and I'm wondering whether the big players in IT might realize that future profits may not come from better software, but from the consulting/maintenance services that accompanies the software (following IBM's tracks).
EDIT: looking at the success of HyperCard/Access, that would probably be a great open source project. taking HyperCards approach to the web.
The other player in the space is Filemaker Pro - a fair bit nicer to work with than Access, although still fairly horrible from an internals point of view (I think they've moved to using proper SQL and everything since I last used it though).
I used to work for a web developer who worked on a well known campground company's site. We had a process that built static html pages out of an old Filemaker database and then synced them to a cluster of Windows web servers. That process has been in place since 2000 and there's no rush to change it because, frankly, it works pretty well.
I believe it started that way because our original developer didn't know anything else.
Absolutely. In fact, it was exactly this situation that got me my first break as a developer. Started working for a gas pipelining company (yes, urgh) as an 'administration assistant' and encountered a spreadsheet based tracking system that involved entering in the same data in six different places.
I threw together an Access database that everyone responded to very well- as you might imagine. The IT department ignored my repeated attempts to get them involved as it progressed from an Access DB to a .NET client front-end app with a MS SQL backend (that I managed to get from the company's external IT contractors).
Shortly before I left to get a "proper" job, they announced that the entire workflow system was moving to SAP, and that the work I'd done would be integrated into that system. That was five years ago... and apparently they're still using my system today.
So don't get me wrong. I like Access users. Access developers, in particular, are the anti-IT department, the rebels, the people who aren't willing to wait for the sysadmins to provision them a server, and they don't have to, because they can just share an Access file on the fileserver. IT departments hate them, which is how I know they're on to something. These are the kind of people I want to help. This is the sort of thing that's the reason I do the work that I do. No kidding.
While it feels a little weird hearing that talk in relation to a Microsoft product, I agree. Building and maintaining a successful (To whatever extent you would call such a niche market a "success") product that helps people solve their own problems instead of feeding the IT priesthood would be awesome.
And then when you talk about the implementation details. My smile turns to a horrified slack jaw expression.
I'd probably feel guilty about it, and I might even try to keep it running as long as I could, but I'd eventually have as much as I could take and give up.