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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.'"
Microsoft sure handed us a raw deal for taking a gamble on their platform.
It is as if I hear a million VB6 developers screaming all at once...
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
I am also interested in knowing how long ESP will be available because 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. It sounds like X-Plane is the way to go from now on. This is the last time I gamble a product's success on Microsoft. Every gaming studio Microsoft touches seems to sink like the Bismarck. http://www.x-plane.com/ms_to_xp/ms_to_xp.html
The X-Plane site itself is offering deals for the abandoned ESP customers:
http://www.x-plane.com/ms_to_xp/ms_to_xp.html
http://www.x-plane.com/ms_to_xp/esp_to_xp.html
http://www.x-plane.com/order.html
I like the comment "X-Plane 9 (temporarily $39.00 to let in all the new MS users)."
Flight Sim WAS ESP. When the team behind Flight Sim - and therefore Flight Sim itself - were canned, ESP was part and parcel of those cuts.
The fact that anybody thought ESP still existed as anything more that a couple of my former coworkers sitting at desk and tying up loose contract and licensing ends... well, that's only because Microsoft carefully obfuscated how much overlap ESP and FS had.
ESP is dead and has been since ACES closed on January 23rd, 2009.
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."
...that MS is planning on open sourcing the entire code base as abandonware, so customers don't have to worry.
It'll be released right after hell freezes over.
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.
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).
She's the only one with the balls for the job.