Doug Werth wrote (in part):
> How many people are literally getting punished now because they bought
a
> certain third party 4GL reporting tool years ago to save programmers
up
> front time. Sure the programmers' productivity went way up. Now,
however,
> performance suffers and they cannot afford to upgrade the box because
their
> hands are tied by said 3rd party.
>

Could it just be that the 4GL vendor was just too stupid to continue to
deliver the functionality needed and too (short term) greedy to keep
prices low enough to upgrade? Becoming fat and lazy has been the death
of more than one company, unless they have an effective monopoly. Plus,
there is the problem of getting lost porting to new platforms instead of
enhancing the functionality of the core product. New revenue streams are
so appealing...

At this time the same [I'm guessing, of course] company is trying to
keep customers by throwing out cheap tid bits along the way for those
paying support dollars. Eventually they say they will even have some web
capabilities, long past when it would have provided a real competitive
advantage to their 4GL customers. Kind of reminds me of the days when HP
expected MPE to roll over and die on it's own, but somehow I don't see
the same ending to the story.

Richard (powerhouse expert, as if I get the chance to write code!)
Gambrell