re: Things I Know Now...

Chris — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 12:31:15 GMT

for a small component not invented here is fine, but a lot of times like for a giant intranet system you need to pay support. quite often the vendor does not give you source code access so if you don't keep paying for support the application will start to have bug after bug. Also as other systems that you use with the application get later and later version without support it becomes a challenge to keep hiding changes from all the other applications to support this ancient legacy piece of software.

The other dark side is that you buy something external that needs to be "customized" to work with your system. this customization costs more than it would cost for you to develop it yourself. Now any change requires a huge amount of money from the vendor so you are hesitant to change anything. You are left on an ancient version of the vendor product unable to upgrade because you would have to pay again for your customization.

What a nightmare. And for a developer it is very frustrating to be in that situation where you don't know how the app works, you don't have source code or even adequate documentation, and you boss expects you to make it work even as everything else is changed/rewritten. Honestly the stress in a job like that makes it not a long time career.

I'm not saying never buy. But if you're going to buy then you're going to pay. After all the extreme case (which still happens) is you bought the system for windows 3.1 and had it customized and then never upgraded. Now you are stuck running windows 3.1, and supporting that, a long with whatever programming languages worked on windows 3.1 (I think VB 4 could do 16 bit and 32 bit apps).