3 ms·
> I wonder why they failed to adapt to the web era At the beginning of the web era; Microsoft owned the software market and did not believe in the web. MySQL
by h2odragon 5y ago
> I wonder why they failed to adapt to the web era
At the beginning of the web era; Microsoft owned the software market and did not believe in the web.
MySQL and PHP were the successors do the "4GL" databases, all the commercial efforts to compete with them ran into the brick wall corner of "only M$ may make money" vs "free".
- bitwize 5y agoIt was more than a question of Microsoft. Microsoft itself fielded two applications in this space: Access and FoxPro; both went on the wane as the web took over. There were a number of factors at work: 1) The rise of n-tier architecture. Clipper and dBASE do not scale well past a single PC. Once you have use cases that mandate multiple (kinds of) clients, separating the concerns of storage, business logic, and presentation starts to make a lot of sense. 2) The fall of ISAM-style "navigational" databases and the rise of relational databases and SQL. The programming advantages of xBase are sapped once you stop thinking of iterating through rows and start thinking in terms of queries. 3) Object-oriented programming became trendy in the 90s, and with it, ORMs. This added complexity to the programming model and didn't dovetail well with xBase's BASIC- and Pascal-influenced procedural model. There were a number of web application products like ColdFusion that flourished in the 90s and early 2000s. But to your point, open source ate most of their lunch. Microsoft lasted a bit longer, but ASP and ASP.NET have had to make a retreat into the corporate/enterprise space. And of course now the latter is open source.