Reprint from: Les Pinter’s DataBase Journal Vol 1, No 6 / November,1998
Years ago, Chrysler built a kit
that could be used to modify the carburetors of its diesel engines, so that
trucks got better gas mileage. It cost over 500 dollars and involved a hefty
mechanic bill as well. Mechanics loved to sell and install it, so everyone was
happy. Except the users.
The military were especially
interested in using computer technology to save money, so they had Chrysler
design and build a computerbased module that cost twenty dollars and did the
same thing that the five hundred dollar kit that took a day to install did. But
they weren’t required to sell it to the public so they didn’t.
Finally, their largest fleet
customers approached them with a proposition: Make a little modification to the
circuit board so that it would boot up in such a way as to pass the EPA DOT
pollution tests. Then , gradually, over the next hour, have it reconfigure
itself to minimize fuel consumption and pollute like a chimney. They did so,
and the trucking industry bought tens of thousands of them and laughed at the
American people.
Chrysler just settled with DOT
for a billion dollars. Chrysler’s
pricing policy wasn’t illegal. It’s perfectly legal to have two products, one
of which is far better, faster and cheaper than the other, and not tell your
customers about it. What was illegal
was the way that they went about it. It wasn’t until their trade practices hurt
American consumers that the government stepped in. Chrysler didn’t give a damn
how much more it cost their customers, or how much it cost the American people.
They just wanted to increase their share price.
Microsoft sells two database
technologies. One – FoxPro – is cheap and fast, and has no incremental cost.
You pay for it one time. The other – VB with SQL server – costs by the seat and
runs considerably slower. FoxPro users can also use SQL, but FoxPro users don’t migrate to SQL Server - not even when they should. They don’t perceive the
need to do so, and often can’t even be talked into it. But give users no
alternative and they’ll go along.
Give them a language that chokes when their local
tables reach fifty thousand records, and offer them SQL as the only way to
salvage their development investment. They’ll come over. They’ll have to. I don’t know whether it’s illegal or not to talk
your own customers into spending twenty thousand dollars for capabilities that
they could have gotten for five hundred. I don’t know if it’s illegal to
recommend a technology that represents massive overkill for most database
projects. Caveat emptor. But it seems wrong. Having higher costs isn’t
necessarily a bad thing for a company. Your competitors simply have to bear the
same costs. Being forced to move from a less expensive technology to a more
expensive one falls equally on all businesses. If your programmers decide to
use MS SQL, it only produces economic disadvantage if your competitors figure
out that there’s something better and cheaper. If they do as you do, then your
costs and those of your competitors go up by the same amount, and no one in
your industry can sell their product more cheaply due to lower costs. No one
loses. Except the American consumer.
What does it feel like to be the only programmer in a
corporate IT department who recommends FoxPro? Remember not being part of the
popular crowd in high school? Remember the power of slander by innuendo?
“If it’s so good, why
doesn’t Microsoft advertise it? They must be ashamed of it.” Nothing could be further
from the truth. Microsoft knows full well how good FoxPro is. MS SQL sales
stand to be reduced by billions of dollars.
And now you know the rest of the story.
We’re the key to this strategy of benign neglect.
With the Justice Department looking on, Microsoft can’t kill FoxPro. But we can. If we buckle to innuendo and the
campaign of silence, Microsoft wins. We, and our customers, and their
customers, are the losers. By bowing our heads and accepting defeat, we allow
might to make right. I know it’s hard to stand up to the incrowd. I’ve been
asked not to raise this issue, but I intend to stand up and be counted. I hope
that you will, too.
Since Microsoft stopped advertising FoxPro, I’ve had
a standing offer to compete publicly against anyone they can name in building a
sample application. No takers. So try it yourself. Take any application, write
it in both languages and compare the development effort; that’s one. Then dump
in a hundred thousand records and run them both, comparing performance. That’s
two. Now, figure out how much it will cost to deploy your application on a
network using SQL Server - the only cure for the glacially slow performance of
large MDB files - paying by the seat for MS SQL. And add in the cost of a
Database Administrator, unless SQL 7.0 saves you that $100,000/ year hidden
cost. And there are others.
It’s not a contest; it’s an IQ test.