Re: why rpg and not cobol

On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 4:56 PM, Stone, Joel <Joel.Stone@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Sorry I don't understand. MS proprietary stuff i[s] on the downslope.
Think MS Word, MS Excel, MS Outlook. Ten years ago EVERYONE
used outlook. Now it is a fraction of what it was. People are RUNNING
to gmail and others like it where they don't have to mess with the
administration headaches.

Calm down. You're exaggerating. Excel is extremely strong in the
real world. I can't say how much Outlook has declined, but it's far
from a dire picture for Outlook. I can tell you that businesses are
definitely NOT running to Gmail. Actually even individuals are
getting a little disenchanted with Gmail for personal use. (Though
it's still the top dog in that arena because there aren't a lot of
competitors that are both free and better than Gmail, certainly not
many that are well-known.)

College kids grow up learning gmail and google docs. They don't know
what MS stuff is outside the Windows OS.

Google Docs has gotten better, but isn't better than MS Office. In
particular, the Google spreadsheet is NOT an adequate competitor to
Excel. Seriously, it is not nearly as good and it is not making a
dent. (Maybe a scratch at best.)

MS open stuff is still going strong - C#, C, visual studio stuff.

Open? Try "proprietary, with watered-down free versions". Granted,
the free versions are perfectly good for most people, including many
professional developers.

But NONE of the MS products are proprietary to the extent of RPG.

This is where you get to actual meat. This is actually true, and not
an exaggeration, and not misleading.

I don't agree with Mark Murphy either. Microsoft is definitely not
"as proprietary as you can get". But most of what you said is just as
ridiculous.

Companies generally like to be proprietary (even the "more open"
ones). That's their nature. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it
doesn't.

John