The Lesser Spotted Sage Line 50 Developer

I got to wondering about how many Sage Developers there really are as opposed to the 750 odd that Sage claim on their web site. The 750 figure presumably includes Developers for all the various Sage products.

For Sage Lne 50 my guess is that there are probably around 40 paid up members of the Developer program.

I've based this guesstimate on the number of Developers you can find on Google without looking too hard, working on the basis that if you have paid £1500 for a Sage Developers license (then £1200 every year) you are probably going to want people to know about it or have a product that uses the Sage Data Objects.

Enough to give the Sage user a reasonable choice but not as many as you might think.

Vista, Sage 50 just call it Twap

I was bemused to find out a few years aago that Twain (a scanner technology acronym) stood for Technology Without An Interesting Name.

I think we can now coin a new term : TWAP or Technology Without A Point.

Prime candidates for TWAP are the Windows Vista and just about any new version of an existing program. To all intents and purposes software development for PCs is dead. I don't mean new innovations such as social networking etc but things like new versions of Windows or Office.

We only purchased new versions of Windows in the vague hope of getting something that actually worked. Once we got Windows 2000/ XP the job was done. As a business user you would have to be extremely stupid (or a Goverment department) to upgrade to Vista.

And for all you Linux fans you would have to be pretty stupid to migrate to that platform as well.

The single point that people in the computer industry fail to grasp is that most business users really really don't care about computers as long as they work. If I have Windows 2000 / XP and Office something I'm never going to upgrade because it works. Why on earth would I spend money when I don't need to. Windows isn't like a car or the photocopier - it doesn't wear out.

New versions of Windows and other applications such as Sage are now just concerned with generating a revenue stream for the vendors. That's it.

All technologies / industries reach a plateau where they just become part of the wallpaper. PC's are everywhere but they are now commodity items. Nobody is going to write a new OS because it isn't needed and it would just cost too much money.

If it works people won't fix it.

Sage 2008 : Nothing new there then

After the debacle of Sage 2007 you might have thought Sage would be a bit more attentive to getting things right in Sage 2008.

Sadly you would be mistaken.

Sage have already released 2 hot fixes to correct problems with the Sage Data Objects (SDO) that are used by Sage Developers and Sage products such as Job Costing that integrate with Sage 50.

There are also problems with Bank Reconcilation and Departments still appear to be a bit flaky.

I'm impressed with the speed that these hot fixes have been released but I'd be even more impressed if Sage had tested it in the first place.

As I've commented (ranted) previously, it's impossible to release a new version every year that actually works. This doesn't fill me with confidence that the forthcoming transistion to using MYSQL as the backend will work before hell freezes over (despite the effects of global warming).

The technical issues with just getting MySql to install on over 100,000 user machines without falling over are immense, never mind porting the whole of Line 50 to use the new technology. Support just doesn't bear thinking about.

Sage hasn't changed the underlying technology since it was first released a very long time ago. Sage users are by and large a fairly docile lot who are just trying to get the job done. 2007 will have tried their patience, 2008 is likely to try it a bit more and start them thinking about what they are paying for.

As usual the best advice is not too upgrade until you have to.