Posted on 10/30/2001 4:52:06 AM PST by Dominic Harr
Monday October 29, 8:44 pm Eastern Time
LONDON, Oct 30 (Reuters) - SAP , Europe's biggest software group, has decided not to use Microsoft's(NasdaqNM:MSFT - news) .Net software and is instead backing a competing offering from Sun Microsystems (NasdaqNM:SUNW - news), the Financial Times reported on Tuesday.
SAP chief executive Hasso Plattner will announce next week the German group is to adopt Sun's J2EE architecture, a development platform for enterprise software based on the Java programming language, to run SAP software, people close to the talks told the newspaper.
SAP's move, if confirmed, is likely to be a blow to Microsoft, as the German group has one of the largest customer bases of any business software developer.
Yep. Unfortunately, John and Jane Public don't even seem to realize that this would be a *good* thing . . .
It takes a minimum amount of technical understanding to know what this is about.
I have heard the same, that 'Peoplesoft' is rather difficult to get started with. But it's suppose to be very robust, I think.
Beyond that, I have no idea.
I kinda like 'Niku6' a lot, for what it's worth . . .
Zere is nuzzink wrong mit auer softwaren. Ze problem is untermenschen who attempt to use it wizaut undershtandink the filosofie and who fall behind in der payments.
GOTT STRAFE Microsoft.
Seriously, SAP's marketing scheme is devilishly clever. Since it takes five years to install, configure, and get SAP working at all, they figure their clients will all go belly up and they get to keep the money.
What is the practical path for jumping on this bandwagon?
I've done the college thing -BS/Purdue U.- and will do it again if I must - just don't know if it's necessary. (My degree is not computer science related.)
Prerequisite programming knowledge?
Some kind of certification/training program to pursue?
I would appreciate your comments!
~~I know you are probably not a career counselor, but I can't resist the opportunity to ask!~~
Easy prediction: Microsoft's first efforts will be called "a toy." Three years later, everyone else will be bust, and the "toy" will be running all but the largest enterprises at much lower cost than today's ERP sytems.
I am not going to get into a debate on the "extortion" question, but I work 50 hours a week on a W2K platform, and I literally can not remember the last time it crashed.
I'm so glad to see that.
I don't know if you've followed many of these threads, but there seems to be a never-ending stream of 'MS can't do anything wrong' folks claiming that a 'cross-platform' language wouldn't matter a whit.
It's rather frustrating . . .
I'm not sure if this is the kind of advice you'll like, but I'd say just go to The Sun Java Site and download the latest 'JDK' (1.3 is the latest 'finished' release, but the 1.4 beta is *very* nice).
The JDK has a compiler with it, and full instructions. You can write your very first program.
Or, you could buy a book. There are lots of good ones.
I left college before my Senior year, never finished my 'Economics' degree, because of a Job offer. And the lack of a degree has never even been a question. It's all about 'job skills'. What you can do for them.
Tell me about it!
It's far better than the 'LotusScript' reporting 'tools' we're replacing, almost revolutionary in comparison to what they're using now. But the company executive's reliance on Lotus is maddening. All our own tools run off of Oracle, with one small DB on SQLServer.
I'm ready to migrate off of Lotus as soon as someone gives me the 'go' signal!
Agreed, I would not yet reccommend Java for an application that reads/writes from a hard drive a few thousand times a minute, or does *serious* number cruching, or does a lot of 'hardware' controls. Altho you might spend less in the long run by just writing a Java program and buying more hardware power, compared to writing, performance tuning and debugging C++ code. If developer time counts as a 'cost' . . . Java code writes and debugs in about half the time as C++, so the end-result is the C++ program costs far more.
But for client/server, rich-client distributed software . . . Java is the *only* sensible choice.
'Cross-platform' or 'platform-independent' programming means software that *out of the box* will run on Linux, Mac, PC, Unix, or any other OS that someone writes a 'virtual machine' for.
Like the internet works now. If you go to any of those Java game sites, including the Microsoft Gaming zone, you can play the Java applets there on *any* of these platforms.
The stuff I write is used by Mac, PC and Linux users regularly.
Sweet machines, I'm sure, but I personally think Sun's machines are overpriced for what you get.
I'm actually not a big 'Sun' fan, altho I do like the language that they, IBM and HP came up with.
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