Re: Selwyn: Why haven't more IT pro's heard of Alpha?
I also come from about ten years building applications using DataEase, went to all their conferences, totally involved like I am with Alpha now. My corporate experience was building a large Telecommunications Management system for state and city government, starting with DOS and through their Windows versions. That product is mostly idle today, sitting at www.smartpremise.com.
If you know DataEase you know what happened to that company (Sapphire Inc.). They lost ALL support from all of their developers because they went in to the business of building applications themselves, in direct competition to the Developer base, who they continue to snub. They shipped most of the work to Russia for 1/10th the cost. 9/11 happened and DataEase was in the right position to capitalize - e.g., they built the management system for the NYC Coroners office. But that's just a side note. DataEase was just sold off recently and Sapphire Group is now 100% a custom application development shop, hardly using the DataEase product at all.
The Developer community fell apart (except for PLM Corporation, which had always provided the backbone of the Independent Developer community.) All of the rest of us left DataEase; I went to Alpha Five. DataEase is all but forgotten now.
Anyway, that is just backdrop to what I wanted to say. I think Alpha's true potential is with the Independent Developer - there are thousands of us in every pocket of the world. If each of us did one small thing consistently, towards making Alpha more popular, more understood in different settings (education, IT, corporate, etc as mentioned above), we could change the "Alpha Who" syndrome.
That it is something we discuss at IADN (click logo below).
I also come from about ten years building applications using DataEase, went to all their conferences, totally involved like I am with Alpha now. My corporate experience was building a large Telecommunications Management system for state and city government, starting with DOS and through their Windows versions. That product is mostly idle today, sitting at www.smartpremise.com.
If you know DataEase you know what happened to that company (Sapphire Inc.). They lost ALL support from all of their developers because they went in to the business of building applications themselves, in direct competition to the Developer base, who they continue to snub. They shipped most of the work to Russia for 1/10th the cost. 9/11 happened and DataEase was in the right position to capitalize - e.g., they built the management system for the NYC Coroners office. But that's just a side note. DataEase was just sold off recently and Sapphire Group is now 100% a custom application development shop, hardly using the DataEase product at all.
The Developer community fell apart (except for PLM Corporation, which had always provided the backbone of the Independent Developer community.) All of the rest of us left DataEase; I went to Alpha Five. DataEase is all but forgotten now.
Anyway, that is just backdrop to what I wanted to say. I think Alpha's true potential is with the Independent Developer - there are thousands of us in every pocket of the world. If each of us did one small thing consistently, towards making Alpha more popular, more understood in different settings (education, IT, corporate, etc as mentioned above), we could change the "Alpha Who" syndrome.
That it is something we discuss at IADN (click logo below).
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