Make of it what you will ... (Part 4)


Where's that Belgian Alain Reymond ? Alain you wanted the Newsgroup to cover COBOL - so how duz Bill's three messages grab yer ?

Well Mr William Klein - you are a right Jonah ain't yer ? Did PECD pay you to write those messages 1, 2 and 3 :-)

Pity about Don Schricker - but seeing that he played bureaucrat for both Wang and Micro Focus - I guess he had a pretty good run at a job that paid well. (I'd probably be delirious with half of his accumulated salary !).

As for the Canucks being involved, I think that died when the guy you put me in touch with back in 2000, returned from sickness to his office in Toronto to find that the parent US company had shut it down ! So he wasn't in a position to represent anybody on J4 ! God knows what the Canadian ISO team has done, or is doing. Quite likely they've just rolled over and gone to sleep.

While Don Nelson may have been 'devoted' on behalf of HP/Compaq while a paid employee, (and I get the impression he has shown up since in a private capacity) - but HP's absence has been signaled for months.

Just in case you have thrown any readers - Fujitsu is not the same as Fujitsu-Siemens. While the Fujitsu we know went around the UK grabbing everything that had the word 'computer' in it's name, the 'old' Siemens was on a merging game on the Continent - one taken over was Nixdorf. As you indicate, under Karl's leadership they are keeping a close watch on COBOL and the OO element of course - well they were until now. Who knows ?

Back in '43 Rodgers and Hammerstein had great success with a new style musical - 'Oklahoma !'. I didn't see it until it was a movie, ('55), with Shirley Jones, Gordon MacRae (hero), and Rod Steiger as the 'baddie'.

Trying to persuade the villain to leave this mortal coil, there's a song by the two male principals, "Poor Jud is Daid'. Hey. Substitute 'COBOL' for 'Jud' :-

Poor Jud is dead
Poor Jud Fry is dead
All gather round his coffin now and cry
He had a heart of gold
And he wasn't very old
Oh why did such a feller have to die?

Poor Jud is dead
Poor Jud Fry is dead
He's lookin' oh so peaceful and serene ([Jud] and serene)
He's all laid out to rest
With his hands acrost his chest
His fingernails have never been so clean

etc....

As for the other Micro Focus lay-offs - my heart goes out to the team of developers - the very people who went to so much effort to make it work. Naturally some of the layoffs will be in pure 'admin' positions, plus no doubt, a significant cut in the marketing team.

The published M/F financial statements sure looked healthy. I guess somebody quietly sat down, worked out a spread***, took income from known dollars and units and projected forwards to see how many times 'n' there would be; each 'n' representing the initial splash by a newly recruited developer, on the compiler, around $3,500; get them to sign up for annual maintenance and then how much do they anticipate from runtime fees - latter is a bit tricky - how many runtime fees per developer, (sometimes maybe only 2 or 3, other times 50 or more), and *exactly* what is M/F going to charge each individual user for runtime ? No doubt the overall forecast/projection from a bean-counter doesn't look too promising.

PS: I should've forgotten about COBOL about five years back. (I certainly didn't leave those J4 meetings at Newbury in 2000 with the enthusiasm of somebody converted to Islam by bin Laden).

Jimmy, Calgary AB
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