Development tools (was Is PowerHouse DEAD?)

[Flora, Bob, Bayan & Nabil]

Jon said:
"The costs described by Robert is probably spent based on
a wish to keep up with technology. Functionally, it way seem like
"standing still", but the costs of not doing such a conversion may very
well be much larger if the old technology is no longer supported or if
it technically limits further development and the use of new tools."

OpenVMS is a NEWER technology than UNIX (in this case HP-UX)
Oracle Rdb 6.n was technically a superior RDBMS than Oracle 7.3.4.
The application remained in PowerHouse.  The only gain I saw was redesigning
ACCESS statements, etc to use embedded SQL instead and the different
transaction model.

Jon's arguments in the particular case I mentioned don't fit.  Not only that
the CIO who wanted to standardize the environment was replaced by a new CIO
who believed in a diverse environment.  This latter CIO quit after only
about a year.

Jon's arguments DO have merit in quite a number of places I have seen.

Blue