4 ms·

This product is aimed at fledgling entrepreneurs with an interest in accruing the benefits of technology, but without the expertise or in-house resources to lev

This product is aimed at fledgling entrepreneurs with an interest in accruing the benefits of technology, but without the expertise or in-house resources to leverage the FOSS chain. Remember: From our perspective, MS is a bunch of evil-empire joykills: lock-in, licensing, lucifier. But for most businesspeople, especially the non-startup bootstrappers, they are promethean, stealing fire from the mandarins of software engineering and bestowing it on worthy dreamers. FOSS is hard; cross-platform is hard; Siena is easy. Personal context: I flinch instinctively when I see or hear MS' products. However, I'm responsible for ops at my job and I know damned well that there are several generations of small businesses for whom 'business management' is spelled 'A-C-C-E-S-S'. You can criticize this, you can complain about this, you can pay a bunch of bright young things to rewrite it Node or whatever, but you are never going to convince the businessowner that Access is a bad idea. That same businessowner started one day in his garage with an empty Access database and remembers both it and those days with justified fondness. He's still just getting over not being able to 'improve' your schema on his laptop on lunch break so it 'makes more sense'. I predict in ten years there will be a huge market for consultants getting businessses OFF this thing. But there will also be a huge pool of new businesses it helped create, so on balance, let me be the first to say: Hello World, Siena, and welcome.

kitsune_ 13y ago
And the Mac equivalent to Access here is FileMaker. Entire kingdoms have been built by using one of these applications as a foundation.
- undoware 13y ago
  Right. Which is why my first advice to a non-tech person starting a business is still 'go out and get Access'. Because I can pitch as hard as I like for Node and Angular, I'm never going to make callback-passing and dependency injection as intuitive as 'New Access Database Wizard'. Come to think of it, 'use Access' is pretty good advice for businessy techies, too. It's a lot harder to rabbit-hole when the earth is actually molded plastic. :)
jsmeaton 13y ago
Unfortunately, it's not just small business. There are some very, very large players that still use Access that I'm aware of. Every thing you said still applies though.
- undoware 13y ago
  I'm aware of this too -- there is a standing wave of businesses with technical debt from their smaller days. Much of the North American economy is underpinned by a volatile mixture of Act! ~2006, MS Access ~2003, and QuickBooks. None of these products like each other, and they are all obsolete. This is at least a big a deal as, e.g, South Korea's eternal love affair with Windows XP. It shapes the whole technoeconomic apparatus.
  - was_hellbanned 13y ago
    I have a relative who is still making very good money writing one-off custom applications for all sorts of local businesses. He works entirely in Visual Basic with an Access back-end. He doesn't even use .Net, it's all old-school VB. With social tech sites like HN and /r/programming, we tend to forget that the business needs that drove the RAD CRUD-type apps of the 1990s never went away, it's just not interesting to talk about anymore.

kitsune_ 13y ago

And the Mac equivalent to Access here is FileMaker. Entire kingdoms have been built by using one of these applications as a foundation.

undoware 13y ago
Right. Which is why my first advice to a non-tech person starting a business is still 'go out and get Access'. Because I can pitch as hard as I like for Node and Angular, I'm never going to make callback-passing and dependency injection as intuitive as 'New Access Database Wizard'. Come to think of it, 'use Access' is pretty good advice for businessy techies, too. It's a lot harder to rabbit-hole when the earth is actually molded plastic. :)

jsmeaton 13y ago

Unfortunately, it's not just small business. There are some very, very large players that still use Access that I'm aware of. Every thing you said still applies though.

undoware 13y ago
I'm aware of this too -- there is a standing wave of businesses with technical debt from their smaller days. Much of the North American economy is underpinned by a volatile mixture of Act! ~2006, MS Access ~2003, and QuickBooks. None of these products like each other, and they are all obsolete. This is at least a big a deal as, e.g, South Korea's eternal love affair with Windows XP. It shapes the whole technoeconomic apparatus.
- was_hellbanned 13y ago
  I have a relative who is still making very good money writing one-off custom applications for all sorts of local businesses. He works entirely in Visual Basic with an Access back-end. He doesn't even use .Net, it's all old-school VB. With social tech sites like HN and /r/programming, we tend to forget that the business needs that drove the RAD CRUD-type apps of the 1990s never went away, it's just not interesting to talk about anymore.