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Overlooking custom applications

Hi NemesisNL:

"Most users in that category do little else the word processing, browsing and emailing."

This is actually not at all true. Almost every business of any size has a plethora of custom applications written over years that dwarfs the code base of Office or the like.

Our company, for instance, has an application that basically runs the company, written in Access. Before you scoff understand this application supports some 60 users, is used by every user in the company that needs a computer for any task, and our company is spread across 12 offices in 10 states, all using this app in real time.

The application does all reporting, electronic data transfer to our customers, dispatching, inventory management, and we're expanding to allow customers limited data entry and reporting capability directly from our system.

In addition we use another app for fleet management, and an app for routing our vehicles. Further our main system integrates to the routing software to automate the process.

Those are just the main applications our company needs. Two of the three are off the shelf Windows applications, but the main one took years of custom development to get right. And undergoes constant revision even now, as customer and company needs change.

By the way, our use of Office itself goes well beyond the 20% norm too, so Open Office simply isn't an alternative.

Like most companies our company is a niche company, our business is extremely specialized but that's the point. Commodity software doesn't give you an edge, it just pays the price of admission to the game. Its the custom software that gives you an edge, and that's where Linux falls down and has an epileptic seizure.

Any potential conversion of our company to Linux would require those applications to be converted as well. Linux simply does not have a critical mass of specialized applications yet.

When you factor in the fact that there isn't a single development standard, well, that leaves Linux stuck in a rut.

You can have all the nice GUI's you want, you can have the basic development tools, but until there's a single standard to shoot for commercial developers simply won't be interested en masse--and that's what you need.

Sure you'll have the occassional Oracle sized company, but Oracle in and of itself isn't a development platform. The tools are simply too primative. To be productive you need third party stuff.

Given the nature of business, a free (as in beer, lets be honest here) OS and application base would be an irrestibable lure--IF it did everything businesses needed.

Perfect example. If the open source community could produce a clone of Access that ran Access programs WITHOUT MODIFICATION (at all), just took a pair of MDB files unchanged from Windows, copied them to Linux, and ran flawlessly, then I'd seriouly consider it.

Forget the rest of Office, just Access. The database engine along with the full blown VBA language/environment.

Give us *THIS*. Development languages that are high level and source code identical so the only thing you have to do is copy your code and compile it and it works.

That's the real barrier to Linux, not the OS but the astronomical amount of EXISTING code it CAN NOT run.

Fix that, and world domination is yours.

(and yes, I know that's a REALLY hard goal)

Posted by: wolf_z   Posted on: 12/22/03 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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