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Microsoft Phasing Out ESP Simulation Platform?
Ian Lamont writes "Overlooked in last month's news about Microsoft laying off the entire Flight Simulator dev team is the news that Microsoft's ESP development team has been gutted as well, and the future of the platform is in doubt. ESP is oriented toward industrial use, and lets companies build 3D simulations for flight and other applications. Late last year Microsoft announced big plans to expand ESP to other verticals, such as real estate, city planning, and law enforcement. That looks increasingly unlikely. Even though Microsoft declined to comment on ESP's future, companies which invested in the product are angry, judging by some of the comments on an MSDN thread. As noted by one user, 'my company used it for a solution and invested time and money into getting it approved and purchased. Microsoft sure handed us a raw deal for taking a gamble on their platform.'"
Stop whining, take the source code and hire your own devs.
Oh, you said MS?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Well... if you don't know what ESP stands for, then why do you reply?
I reply because I'm getting tired of people expecting that the whole world knows what their 3-letter-abbreviation stands for.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esp
ESP, in my field, is an Electrostatic precipitator. I'm pretty sure that Microsoft isn't working on cleaning up exhaust gases though. I guess it is the "Microsoft ESP - A visual simulation package produced by Microsoft", as found at the bottom of the 3rd (!) list of ESP-abbreviations on wikipedia.
Thanks.
It takes only a few characters to actually spell it out, and explain it, but it takes a minute to google it.
MFC, OCX/ActiveX/COM/DCOM, ATL, VisualJ, FoxPro, ...
839*929
You'd be amazed by how much industry-specific software is out there. This kind of software has 25 customers, with 100 users each, and each of them pay $1-2M for the licenses. It is the polar opposite of Microsoft Office. And therein lies the problem...
Like any industry we use a ton of this stuff at work. I've always found that you're better off finding a successful vendor that specializes in this kind of work than buying something like this from a big software house. When you go with the specialized vendor the product probably makes up 30-100% of their revenue. With the major software house the product makes up 0.001% of their revenue and their main focus is on stuff that comes in boxes on the shelf of Best Buy or wherever. Usually this kind of stuff starts out in small companies and gets bought out by a big company. They invest minimally (nothing truly innovative - mainly support for database/OS upgrades), and milk the maintenance contracts. Eventually everybody abandons them and they drop the product entirely.
Sure, you also take a gamble with a small company. However, with small companies I can sit down and talk to their development team and they actually have a vision for where their product will be in five years. They actually come up with new ideas. If you get in early you can actually build goodwill and form a partnership and get discounted rates. Or, you can pay full retail by waiting until they're already popular, but then most of the risk of being abandoned goes away. Just make sure the core development team isn't about to sell out - it helps to get to know them and their motivations a little.
Sure, if you're talking commodity software (software used in ANY industry - webservers, email, development platforms, etc) just go open source. However, you'll find this isn't much of an option when you get to industry-specific stuff (with some exceptions).
It has a development team, that good enough for you?
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
Too often I have heard the following argument against OSS - "You don't know when support will end or if the project will exist tomorrow." This is true. But you can make relative safegaurds against choosing a dead software package. How long has it been around? How much activity? How popular? How many participants? I can also download a sample several packages without pulling out my wallet. If support suddenly stops, I still have access to the code should I need to develop the product further.
With a proprietary package, it is take it or leave it with a limited amount of options.
Certainly both approaches (OSS and closed) have there pros and cons, but with OSS I am better able to hedge my bet against obsolescence.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
That's going to make a difference in the long term, but right now FSX is still the sim of choice for those who value the things that He Who Has No Name mentioned (X-Plane may be superior in some other areas). Moreover X-Plane's dev team is tiny compared to ACES, so it will probably take them years to catch up. Unless of course they snap up some of the ex-ACES folk now on the job market...
How would that work?
You set up a consortium, come up with all the features you'd need in your software. Then you hire someone who's willing to acquire all the specialized knowledge needed to make specialized software, and begin making it. Lots of the features your consortium came up with won't be possible, leading to lots of meetings and debates in order to find a working compromise.
That will take a while, and in the meantime members of this consortium will change their minds on some of the features, some will want to leave and others will want to join.
In the end, after a few years, you'll have a piece of software designed by a comitee, few members of which are actually qualified to design software.
Then you release it as free software - to what end? Successful free software sticks around because it has a large userbase, something not given in this case. Nobody is going to pick up that code and start working with it, unless they happen to have an industry to run. In which case, they're most likely not going to start tinkering with the code very much.
Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
The big issue is leadership. You need it to make good software.
When 10 guys decide to live on hot dogs for three years to make a software product, that is leadership. If what they make does well they all end up owning islands, otherwise they end up having to get regular jobs.
When Google decides to take over the mobile phone OS market with an open source offering, writes 95% of it themselves, and then uses it as a platform to make money on value-adds, that is leadership.
When some guy in his spare time invents an application, and gets a few friends to join in, that is also leadership.
This kind of stuff doesn't tend to come out of consortiums of equals. I can think of a few initiatives like that in my industry and none of them have gone anywhere. The problem is that software isn't core to these industries. Their CEOs don't talk about software in their shareholder meetings. Software leaders don't become company leaders - they go to other companies if they have those kinds of ambitions.
Most companies want somebody else to solve the problem for them and then pay big money for the product. They line up for outsourcing opportunities for this reason - even if with proper focus they could do the same job cheaper in-house. The key word is "proper focus" - if IT is considered just a distraction then it won't get the leadership needed to be successful - you just need to buy stuff.
So, while I agree that what you suggest could work in theory, it won't work in practice. Companies would rather spend $100M buying products than $10M trying to do it themselves.