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Bad, bad, bad, bad, BAD move by Rational.

IBM is where good companies go to die.

In a midnight-stealth deal, the CEO took the IBM offer without even waiting for a competing offer from Microsoft, when most of Rational's customers use their tools on Microsoft's platforms.

Now, instead of providing additional revenue to IBM, Microsoft will improve Visio's UML tools, and bury Rational Rose and the rest of the software suite without so much as a whimper.

Anyone remember Notes? Sure, the CEO and the board get rich, but for the great developers at Rational, I expect most of them will end up in Redmond in the not too distant future.

Now, instead of providing additional revenue to IBM, Microsoft will improve Visio's UML tools, and bury Rational Rose and the rest of the software suite without so much as a whimper.

According to a Business Week article, Microsoft was planning inhouse development to replace the Rational offerings!

Bad, bad, bad, bad, BAD move by Rational.

IBM is where good companies go to die.

You say that like it's a bad thing. :-)

I had to use Rational Rose a few years back, and IMHO it hurt more than helped for writing C++ code. They had a miserable GUI coupled with a screwed-up scheme for "automatic" code generation where Rose would generate the header files and empty definitions for the functions (the easy part), and the programmer had to wade into a file that looked like so many random characters to write the actual code. Instead of just writing the code, we had to spend all kinds of time figuring out how to get the "tool" to spit out the right thing.

Anyway, I'm still bitter about it.

bury Rational Rose and the rest of the software suite without so much as a whimper

I think you're right about Rose. Visio is a poor man's Rose already, Rose is bigtime bloatware, and Microsoft will walk right into that market. But the cross platform tools like Purify aren't a target market for Microsoft. But the bloat in Purify and ClearCase will end up killing them too.

Anyone remember Notes? Sure, the CEO and the board get rich, but for the great developers at Rational, I expect most of them will end up in Redmond in the not too distant future.

Remember it? I develop for it every day. Notes is going strong and is better than ever. IBM's buyout of Lotus has been very good for Notes developers. The product is much better.

As for the strange idea that Notes is 'bloated crapware' how many other products can you name that include forms, document and field-level security, encryption, full-text search and integration with relational systems, all in one box? As a mail client, sure it's fat. But so what? It supports all the mail standards: you can use any mail client you want and still use Notes' security and full text search and so on. You can for example use the Outlook mail client as a front end for Notes mail.

It's a commonplace that Notes is going away real soon now because of [insert name of some other technology here]. I just wish I had a nickel for every time I've heard that.

I'm taking the 6.0 certification exam tomorrow. Wish me luck!