Company A then gets to decide how to spend a wad of cash rebuilding their little document management app from scratch.
It can't be very hard to port source code from Visual Basic 4 to Visual Basic.NET. Even if you have to rewrite the GUI forms from scratch you should still be able to reuse functions and subroutines with minor modifications. Since you refer to this as a "little" document management app then I imagine and Visual Basic programmer could rewrite the application in a weekend.
If they don't have the source code on the other hand, whose fault is that? They should've insisted on getting the source code for an application they paid to have developed. The other more obvious solution is to simply buy a commercial document management system.. there are dozens of them these days and they probably run circles around their custom app.
If it catches on there should be a market for the grandma / college kids doing word processing / IM etc no?
No. It seems that every 5 years or so the public collectively seems to forget the past. As has already been said, we've all tried to do this before, including using a web browser as the desktop metaphor. It doesn't work and people aren't interested in giving up local control of their data and applications to some application service provider. Why would anyone use these ASPs when practically ever single new computer these days comes bundled with an office suite of some sort? You could just download OpenOffice for free as well. What benefit does anyone gain by renting an application from an ASP when you can already get the apps for free that will run faster on your desktop?
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It can't be very hard to port source code from Visual Basic 4 to Visual Basic.NET. Even if you have to rewrite the GUI forms from scratch you should still be able to reuse functions and subroutines with minor modifications. Since you refer to this as a "little" document management app then I imagine and Visual Basic programmer could rewrite the application in a weekend.
If they don't have the source code on the other hand, whose fault is that? They should've insisted on getting the source code for an application they paid to have developed. The other more obvious solution is to simply buy a commercial document management system.. there are dozens of them these days and they probably run circles around their custom app.
No. It seems that every 5 years or so the public collectively seems to forget the past. As has already been said, we've all tried to do this before, including using a web browser as the desktop metaphor. It doesn't work and people aren't interested in giving up local control of their data and applications to some application service provider. Why would anyone use these ASPs when practically ever single new computer these days comes bundled with an office suite of some sort? You could just download OpenOffice for free as well. What benefit does anyone gain by renting an application from an ASP when you can already get the apps for free that will run faster on your desktop?