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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5711209" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, it is always dangerous to generalize about people in ANY context of course <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />I think my point is that you do find that your customers never reach 'satiation' when it comes to functionality. I think the 'we had a program that did this' issue is more managerial and policy based than technical. Were I the DDI technical guys I'd have been saying to management that you needed to work on the new CB and still keep the old one around. Management's response was probably "well, corporate told us we can't do that!" and/or "Pay for support of 2 programs that do the same thing, are you crazy?" coupled with IT saying "well, it will take a year to rebuild this as a web-app unless you want to fund us to do it faster". There was simply no option that didn't involve a rollback in functionality for a period of time. Given them credit, the main areas of functionality were in there pretty quickly. Some things that were really desirable didn't happen right away, but again, unless you want to start paying more for DDI they just probably realistically couldn't accomplish it faster. This is quite true. The corollary part of it is it is very easy to say "just add a custom power feature" but WHAT will it do? Powers are QUITE various. Chances are people don't want to add simple powers, they want to add weird wacky things that do complicated stuff. You could be pulled into a real scope tarpit trying to get it to the point that people are satisfied with.Just in general too, making software that is going to roll out to 100k users is a big job. The most simple trivial updates can take a lot of work. For instance right now I'm trying to roll out an update to a system I wrote. I've just spent 2 weeks (and not finished yet) just trying to verify that when I roll out that update that the existing database and the slightly modified database will work out. ALL the data has to be dumped out, modified, and put back, all automatically and all perfectly, and it all has to happen in the 15 minute maintenance window, on a system that SHOULD be identical to the development system I'm using, but I will have to manually verify that every single step of the process will actually work on the production systems perfectly, and create a whole other process to make it all fall back to the old database if it doesn't work. This stuff is basically 5 minutes of work if I'm twinking around with my own program that I use and maybe other people might or might not use and doesn't matter if it breaks for a few hours. Line-of-business stuff like this just gets way labor intensive real fast. So, yeah, making the RTF may not be all that hard (I don't know) and maybe it even took 2 hours to code it up (probably a few days, but not a lot). It may well OTOH take 500 hours of work to roll out the patch successfully.</blockquote>

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