<< Back Home
The Web : Why Nearly All Web-Based Applications Built Today are Junk!!! (and the Programmers suck,too)
or "Most of the web applications and services being built today are JUNK!", 03/01/05
Thats Right, Most Websites and Business Applications built by Web Developers and Programmers Are Really Really Bad Folks!
We recently had a very interesting (if not very common) news event occur here on local stations here in Dallas, Texas. It seems that our local court and jail systems are in a panic since the technology behind those city services has crashed. When I say crashed, thats probably extreme, but essentially whats happening. Apparently the city bought a $10 million dollar technology "system" to manage court records, bond accounts, court schedules, hearing schedules, inmate data, and records of various sorts. Without getting bogged down in the dirty details, it seems once again, on the news, we have another example of how technology has "failed us", and the system, and how one technology vendor is at fault for failing to implement what was touted as a great system, second-to-none. Whats funny is how angry certain members of our city council have gotten over the matter....and I have to say, rightfully so. I mean the havoc this is causing our city is considerable, since it affects people, and lives, and inmates, and especially families awaiting justice, and as well, those of us wondering what is happening while all these criminals roam the city. Maybe Im getting melodramatic here, but the fact of the matter, here is another case of seemingly "failed technology" at work.
Now as I usually do, I ramble in my article....and Im not scared to admit that. I'll leave it to you to piece together my lesson-to-be-learned on this one. I will say this, in terms of my thesis for the article....that its NOT technology that has failed us here. Its people that have failed us, and people meaning, the vendor and the customer, but most of all the developers and project managers who failed to architect technology solutions correctly. Its a "planning" problem and a strategy problem as well. All these are failures of people to put quality and long-term strategy above short term gain. In the case of programmers, its lazy short-sited egotistical developers thinking they know how to build things that work when they simply left out the bigger plan in their codework. That bigger plan is designing for change, flexibility, modularity, and simple organization principles. These always bubble up later in millions of dollars spent by application managers supporting bad products, or inflexible or complex and confusing open-source nightmarish code logic that costs hundreds if not thousands of man hours just to sort out and reprogram. In my example above, the system simply crashes and all that money saving using overseas or sloppy outsourced talent contrived on some upper-level managers "brilliant business idea" leads to years of pain for the business consumers who have to implement, maintain, and use this crap. Its all based on valuing true innovative US IT talent, not cost savings and an overseas patchwork of programmers who have NO emotional or financial incentive in what you are trying to achieve in your product. Thats bad. Lose innovation and your company will eventially die. I'll explain why as I go on in later articles.
Computers and programs just do what they are told to do and fail when they have to due to poor implentation, overextended data systems, poor logic constraints, and other factors. Once again, its a human factor to blame here, for failing to "put it together" properly and failing to maintain it properly. I would even add failures in terms of sales people in knowing the potential problems and acknowledging those, as well as the customer in honoring the technology requirements and maintaining technical staff to buy off on the concept, review the product, evaluate the product specs, and implementing it. These all involve humans, right? Ok, so you say, why should you care? Allot of dumb people in one scenario. Well, unfortunately its the same scenario in every business decision Ive ever seen in the IT business world!
Essentially, though, you should care, because guess what....if you are a developer, and a person who is right now developing web application software in helping a business to move that data to a more "usable", "accessible", "better" internet "portal" or "extranet", then this issue involves you! Second, if you are a business manager, responsible for cutting budgets and replacing highly skilled US technology people with outsourced or understaffed people to manage your carefully budgeted brand new "business portal", then you also are to blame. Those two groups caused the mess thats now occuring, not just in Dallas's Court Systems, but really in major airlines, in supply chain systems, in government projects (ie the FBI), and numerous other "mission critical" applications.
Lets look at this from my point of view first of all. I work in IT and I see it all the time....one the one hand some very very complicated business problems and projects are regularly passed into the hands of our programming group. Many of these business problems no one man or woman could be expected to grasp in a single corporate meeting....yet we are. Then we are expected to turn around and patch together an underbudgeted enterprise level application that both solves the problem for the client, as well as reads their mind and solves other problems they didnt bother to tell us about during the writing of the spec doc. Yes, that is a very common scenario. But because the client is always right, we pull extra hours and patch together a band-aid, in budget, and send out the new project. In between all the managemnet and programming allot of subtle issues always raise their head in the dirty details of programming. One of the most important is one FEW DEVELOPERS REALLY CARE TO ASK THEMSLEVES...."What happens if this web application grows really big and the data explodes in size?". The other question most dont ask is, "What happens if the client uses this application in ways it wasnt meant to be used?". Managemnet usually steps in and says..."dont worry about that, just do what your told, and no more!" And so, the project goes out the door, and we colect our checks. Now, another intersting event almost always occurs in my development group. Usually there is noone that steps up and decides HOW TO ORGANIZE THE PROJECT. Sounds obvious but that is the single worst thing Ive seen occur. What that translates to is a group of guys so busy designing away their individual solutions, that they dont even bother to sit back and do something as simple as say, come up with a "taxonomy" or naming scheme for databases, fields, file names, folder names, and where all the PHYSICAL FILES WILL BE ORGANIZED. Wow, you may so, so what. Guess what....as a project gets bigger and bigger, it gets harder and harder to maintain. And that means, the next set of guys to use the "beast" we built, will like us in using the clients old data systems, force us to abandon the old system whole heartily, and thus, like a mother who beats her kids, so too those kids will beat their kids. Not the best analogy I know, but dramatic enough, huh. My point being in all this.....DEVELOPERS CREATE JUNK, and DONT PLAN FOR THE FUTURE and COULD REALLY CARE LESS ABOUT THE FUTURE OF THEIR CLIENTS DATA AND INFORMATION, and its blatantly obvious that all the web applications being made today, despite the hype, are junk and will be thrown on the software "scrappile" someday. Why? Because there will be NOTHING USEFUL OR BRILLIANTLY DESIGNED IN WEB APPLICATION CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS TODAY, BEYOND THE DATA ITSELF, WORTH SAVING OR PROGARMMING AGAINST OR PROGRAMMING FOR. Wow, so sad! You agree????
If you own a business buying software today, thats very troubling assertions, isnt it! And to be coming from a developer! Well, its the TRUTH, and mark my words, software programmers are creating JUNK today, and it wont last and it will make migrating data from these sloppy "proprietary systems" so much hard when the day comes. IS it truly a fact, you ask? YES! I have recently reviewed Sharepoint by Microsoft from code to implementation to use, as well as ecommerce systems like Storefront, and now DotNuke, and finally open source Portal Rainbow. Ive also recoded other developers code, as well as built my own content managemnet systems for websites. I see the fun and excitement of being able to create a simple login that links to forms of data sucked from a database, and which is now managed by the user. The promise is there, but sorry, the standards and best practices are not for many. Thus, we have the promise, but the mess remains. How bad is it? Its so bad that its costing us time and money and respurces and business expensive licensing to buy this junk. Its bad also because so many people are claiming they are programmers now, just because they know .NET or PHP. Its bad because so many of these projects seem to be packaged with promise, but to me, look like "betas". These are all, in my opinion, sloppily and hastliy built solutions to much larger problems. And its not as much what these apps do for businesses today, as it is what they do for the life of a business period. Its almost as if the disposable nature of web pages were inherent in all these apps, so when they burn through their usefullness, a business could apply for the next iteration of the software and getting an update, their data instantly appears in a new and better format. But I digress....
My whole argument in all this is the fact that both web software (after my review of many many apps personally) as well as software programmers as a whole, really SUCK! YEs, despite the respect and hard work they put in, and the incredible services that these apps can provide on some level, the "promises" are still lies and I think it sucks to see how bad the whole scenario really is compared to what it claims to be. And so many web-based contenet managemnet systems and programmers claim to be so grandiose and great....when in reality on one level they just are not. Why? Because they work well ONLY INSIDE THE LITTLE WORLDS OF DATA THEY MANAGE!!!!! And they suck because they are NOT designed with any sense of how data needs change, or how the front end designers need to change look and feel, or have the flexibility to bend their own rules in how clients choose to interact and manage that data. And the markup or html is so non-compliant with the new XHTML and CSS standard, thats its quite frankly, pathetic. If you look at Sharepoint, Storefront, and Rainbow Portal, the front end html design is so bloated, junky, IE-only compliant and inflexible for markup coders, that unless you manually plan to go in a gut every page, object class, usercontrol, and markup tag, you will end up with a product that is quite frankly JUNK! (see my article on .NET and the causes here:
Microsoft.NET : What in the Hell is This Stuff? ...and showing you all the little flaws that come with it...). What is the result of all this? The result is we will see a huge problem in the next ten years as business attempt to reform and customize these inflexible .net portal applications. The pain will come in the form of data that must be stripped out and migrated over to xml schemas and advanced systems. It will take the form of armies of contenet managers and semi-qualified techies with no clue in how to salvage or train on the proprietary "mess" that is the backbone of these CMS systems. Whats worse, most of these development teams and groups, including outsourced clients, will dry up and the big players will be left. The legions of tech people needed to sort out this web-based CMS mess will be huge! Lastly, the real benefit of a standardized development community will come too late for the gigs and gigs of web page development code sitting on servers that will have to be junked for more advanced systems that have the flexibility to survive and grow with their clients. Thats my prediction folks...take it or leave it! Allot of pain coming for business....
Now, I may have you thinking twice about development and the web. I dodnt want to do that, because that was not my intention. To say that web systems are not solving problems, and doing that well would be foolish and false. Quite frankly, web-based apps are changing the face of business, as are services. But that is not the problem....the problem is the fact we have so many developers with big egos designing and trying to sell businesses on their disorganized and poorly thought out systems. The same applies for most open souce projects. Rainbow is a perfect example fo a system Im working on now, that is on the service quite cool but if you dig under the hood, like SHarepoint, is a developers nightmare. They COULD have made things so logical, simple, inclusive, flexible, intuitive, and quite frankly, useable. This system like many fails on all those levels. Its too bad, because we are forced to use this system now by our management group. Its the only system we can find as well thats free (big word!) and that gets us up and running with SOMETHING! Yet, as I always argue, the TIME its taking to LEARN this stuff, and then figure out how to write modules for, not to mention gutting the product as we are having to do to rewrite the sad, sloppy HTML markup implemented through ignorance, means lost hours and time we could have spent elsewhere. The fact of the matter is, THERE IS NO REALLY USEFUL WEB CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM OUT THERE that has the easy flexibility to address all users needs. And from my point of view, thats shocking. Why, becaue it can be done. Whats not happening is the organization of great engineering minds online in building an organizational concept for building such a program, or even the principals behind such a system. Whats worse, is, there really is not guiding STANDARD for web developers to follow that universally applied....kinda like what electricians or plumbers or even most auto mechanics follow. All those groups have a "trade" that stands behind a cataloged system of parts or products or systems that follow rules all must apply on some level. Sure, there are "rogues" in every industry, but on the web, there is nothing but greed, competition, and egos. PERIOD! Ive never met such an arrogant and ignorant group of people as the people that try and sell technology. They know nothing about the code....know very little about concepts, and are chasing the same dreams people were doing in 2000 before the DOt Bomb hit. When will we learn folks. Arrogant and disorganized programmers and managemnet teams and sales people dont add up to great innovative problem-solving, long-lasting and profitable business models in IT. Thats been proven the last ten years. Look who's left! I'm waiting to work for a company that understands the cost and time involved in taking your time in building talented teams of trained and qualified programmers and innovators, who are lead by a person with long term innovative goals, not short-sited corporate profits. Those are so hard to find. Thus we have the web software and will, in the future, see these sloppily, hastily built applications that will in the end fail due to their disorganization, failure to address organization and useability long term for the client, and who continue to make false far reaching claims that dont hold up.
Now to the meat of my article, believe it or not. The real issues surrounding whats happening in IT goes beyond just bad sofwatre and disorganized short-sited programmers. It goes hand-in-hand with how businesses themselves are undermining technology. This goes back to the Dallas issue. When businesses buy into the fact that technology software will instantly solve all their problems and they can suddenly let all their staff go that support that technology, then trouble is brewing and the cost saving applied actually increase over time when the talent needed to keep the system running are undervalued or flat out removed. I suspect thats what happened here in Dallas....a city trapped with a budget they cannot support, and whom is forced to undercut some services. When technology is undercut, it can backfire and actually cost more later, and thats EXACTLY my main point of this article....
There is a much larger problem with technology than most people know. It goes beyond dumb people using technology or managing technology in a way that creates security issues. It has to do with too little repect for managing that technology and too many people programming the software without regulation or standards to support it. The result: Cybercrime running wild, poorly managed software implementations by businesses, and poorly designed software from programmers.
Whats really scary is many businesses are getting really really REALLY dependent on all this technology and software being written, to the point where most organizations have a dire dependence on technology to keep their business alive and profitable. What worse, more and more business like ChoicePoint have built complete bsuiness models based on internet data, and now really just deal in moving information around....and thats the name of the game it seems toady in this world of ours! By point is....what are these business really selling then?...hmmmm. Whats worse, if one criminal gets in the system, BOOM.....the house of cards comes tumbling down.
But there is a much bigger set of problems coming with technology....if it isnt here already all over the news.
As I said earlier, we have a well-publisized problem here in the big City of Dallas, Texas. Our criminal justice system and jail and courts records systems failed last year and have been down for months now and city hall is screaming mad about it. Whats worse, the way they are handling it, is a "macrocosm" of how my IT clients behave when their little web projects we build dont do something they expect.....they make sweeping judgements that we failed to design a "good site that works" and they expected something else. They then decide to try and pull in another vendor to remedy the situation. In our companies case, actually, that scenario rarely if ever happens on my end of the floor as I design based on contingency practices, and never get calls back from my clients after I implement my programs. But it has happened in our company, and when it does, as like the last time it did, turned out the web user didnt understand to click a simple radio button before logging in after a purchase. Our CEO cut our heads off until he realized we hadnt done anything except design a brillaint piece of software that one person out of hundreds happened to fail to read instructions on before logging in. People and some very very intelligent people it seems continue to undervalue or misidentify technology and all the complicated issues surrounding it. And thats what happened here in Dallas....allot of angry people misidentifying the real problem in the first place....cutting costs by going with the cheapest IT vendor then failing to train people to support the huge system they bought. Who's fault is that? Maybe the city managers, but its a symbol of what is happening across businesses....failing to RESPECT the technology and software as something that still needs people to manage and maintain and support. And as software and the data gets larger and more complex, it takes more than just warm bodies and smart people....it takes enlightened organized management with IT experience and the big bucks for the talent to keep the train moving smoothly while planning for the next big migration of that data upwards!
Whats worse, in this lesson learned, solving a thousand IT complexities can all be taken down by one bad piece of data or in our case one misinformed client. In the case of Dallas City Hall, its still confusion, and false assumptions are still being made and will be until some wise technology project leaded takes the reigns in and figures out who's at fault and what managment either failed to do with the system, the city failed to pay for, what "talent" was cut from the budget, or what the developers failed to design. Until they do that is funny to note that all the money cut is now costing the city probably ten times that in the pain suffered.
Interesting concept!.....pay full price to do it right the first time and everything works far into the future.........OR......pay one half the cost to do it cheaply the first time by underskilled outsourced programmers, undercut the project implementation staff to save more money, then have to do it all over again the right way at ten times the cost. Which would you choose???
This gets me to my point and that is that we will continue to see some more mission critical failures surrounding IT in two main fronts that will burn allot of business in the coming years.....the first is the continued underevaluation of technology and false assumptions that just because it sounds "cool" and solves problems, doesnt mean you can suddenly fire all your IT staff, hire some underlings and have faith they can keep the beast running. I mean, some very complex software is now being written and is required to manage loads of mission critical data. In the case of Dallas's system now failing because they decided to do things cheaply, it now means, long lines of people, inmates starving in jails, justice for crimes not being served, criminals on the streets, court house funding truncated, etc. etc. Its bad....real bad. Companies like ChoicePoint is really no different, and is a perfect example of how stupid people hopped again on the data-as-business bandwagon, not fully respecting what that technology did or could be used for, and built a business model once again on the backs of technology and the internet, failing to understand the consequences if that model was abused or breached. And it was and was violated big-time! In this case the business ship sinks but so does a piece of society....much the same as the City of Dallas is suffering, along with its citizens.
My second point is most web developers SUCK these days. Yes, I mean really suck as a whole....so many tool are out there that its enabling all kinds of people, I feel, who have no business being in software development. Used to be a select group of educated engineers that were doing most of the stuff in the 70's and 80's that supported medicine, retail, finincial exchanges and business data.....and it worked, for the most part. Now days, anyone in India or off the street can pick up a book and BOOM....hey, man, Im a software developer! Let me design your banks secure financial website and login, and if it breaks because I didnt bother to organize or train my sweat shop programmers to design for contingency or on organized programming principals....so what. Programmers are cheap...go find another shop!
Thats whats happening now. I just finished evaluating Microsoft's Sharepoint, a licensed ecommerce .net system called Storefront, open source Rainbow Portal, DotNuke, and a few other free and licensed portals and CMS systems. I design those for a living myself. All of them, in my book, despite the hype....are flat out JUNK! They either dont work half of the time, are confusing to use, have poor usability, and most of all, were obviously written with no markup training AT ALL! The HTML is so bad and so clunky in all these products its flat out useless. Really!
My point being, that there is more and more software programmers coming forward with Content Management Systems....not because they are smart...but because the tools are there that help them build these things! There is no REAL innovation, and whats worse, most of theses applications and the programmers behind them simply dont understand how to build good software. Im convinced there is a huge wave of problems for businesses that are coming when businesses who implement these monstrously bad data schemas and system, see how hard it will be to move to the next big system....why? Simply because there are so many bad programmers designing these diorganized systems with little or no formal training to back them up or their work. Because technology is somewhat of a closed loop when it comes to the actual teams that progarmthe stuff, there is allot of "hiding" going on, and developers are not held accountable. WHen these system break because they are so hard to maintain years from now, qand the loads of poorly structured data overflows, then the heartbreak occurs and so many business are and will see the problems evident in their designs. Meanwhile, more junior level programmers, many from abroad, continue to build these messes, and I predict the pain to come will be emmense. I predict that there will be a backlash against programming and that backlash will create a formal software standard or certification standard that will greatly clear out the bad and usher in a new age of standardized practices across the internet. That day will finally erase most of the bad sofwtare being built today as everyone will be somewhat forced, as will vendors like Linus and Microsoft, to do things the right way and foprce programmers to follow convention or get booted out! Thats the only way we can take away whats happening in Dallas and other business systems. If you dfont believe me when I say software progarmming is bad and the worst its every been....keep your eyes on the news! More is coming!
This is not to say technology is not running and solving trillions of problems every second of the hour in a brilliant fashion....it is doing that now. Its amazing how many data transactions are occuring every second right now....so technology succeeds, anmd will continue to succeed and make our like easier. But not before we experience allot of pain.....thats right, more pain and learning for city managers who cut budgets and startups built on data exchange....not real business services. And thats what will grace your headlines I predict as the years go by until we give technology and technology workers the RESPECT they deserve and require to manage, design and put boundaries around this field of study. Get ready!
If you don't listen to the technology talent and the innovators and both build things the right way, and spend the money to correctly maintain that technology (in other words, be REALISTIC about what technology can do and cannot do), then YOU WILL GET BURNED. And who is "we"? "We" is the technology services company AND the customer. In Dallas's case, it happens to be the city that will end up spending all kinds of money to fix a problem they thought they could solve by getting the CHEAPEST most competitive bid. If they had gone for QUALITY and paid more up front by getting quality developers, they might have gotten a better job and actually saved money. Now, over years, they will pay more to support this product. This is exactly what I predict for the legions of hastily build web-based applications being implemented cheaply to support business data. Not a one of them will stand ten years from now to continue to support new innovation and data needs required by that business. Nor will they assist in migration of that data or processes to newer systems...another short-sited factor in many American business innovations. But as I was saying, there is the issues of maintenance. And that is, business continue to by technology then when it fails, they fail tehmselves to have undertsoof the importance of spending money to maintain it and continue the cost cutting advantages. Tahts crucial for businesses to understand. Is it possible to buy into a system on the web that supports your data and grows with you and is flexible enough to allow designers and developers to manage the contenet, markup, and business intelligence code? Yes, but I have YET to find one! What all this means is the fact that TECHNOLOGY IS NOT RESPECTED, either by the businesses of decidion makers that by and support the product, nor the managemnet teams that implement innovations by hiring talented highly paid web developers who are given the time needed and freedom to design superior applications that address future business gaols, contingency, useability, and organization in their products. Instead, "hacks" are used to hack and slash software as quickly as possible, and the guys who understand the web and good best practices, are delegated to learning sloppily build open soucfe software and trying to tarin their clients in supporting sloppy products with undercut undertrained staff that have to business managing such programs, anyway. Its no wonder we have so many technology crash=and-burn systems in the news. Until this changes, I expect allot more folks!
So, before I end, what are some solutions...
- Dont mistake experience programmers for innovative programmers. Anyone can hack together something cool, but if the client calls back for the THIRD REDESIGN, something is wrong! If the client calls back over and over for fixes or bugs, something is wrong with how that programmers is programming. It doesnt matter how complicated or specialized the business intelligence required in the database or the .NET logic required...there is ALWAYS a simpler, cleaner, better, more organized, future-based way of carefully organizing that logic and those systems so that the final product reflect the EXTRA TIME AND COST involved in building a solidly organized product thatNEVER BREAKS, and will grow with the company. All my contenet managemnet systems, simple or complicated, are all simple to use and grow with my clients data and I rarely get a call back. Hire innovative programmers, not hacks!
- Buy from technology companies that go for quality....not the sale! You should look, NOT at a companies case studies or even portfolio. You should call up a company that has RECENTLY built a web application for them, get their IT support or head engineer or web master on the phone, and talk to them personally about the web application. SOMEONE IN THAT COMPANY CODES OR SUPPORTS THAT PRODUCT EVERYDAY, and will have a nice long list of what they hate and what they love about that technology companies software. Whethere its custom or enterprise out of the box, its the same thing....its the human interaction with that product that counts! I try and design all my CMS ASP systems around easy interfaces with clean and easily changed markup. My clients rarely if ever call me with compliants and the EXTRA TIME I took to design those systems the right way means all those clients everyday interact with my systems and they work and are easy to use and make managing that data fast and efficient. That translates to money BACK FOR OUR COMPANY, and MONEY SAVED BY THE CLIENT. No one ever talks about that or measures that, but its very measurable everytime I hear about someone else web app crashing! :o)
- Dont undercut you IT staff just yet! You may think you are so great to be saving your company money by making cuts. I wouldnt see it that way. Talent....whetehr is IT or medicine, etc., is hard to find. If you gut tells you you have some people with talent, or potential, no matter what their age or situation with the company, I would hang on to them retrain and get them on baord your new IT startegy. LISTEN TO THESE PEOPLE...they know your IT arm-of-your-business better than YOU! Why? Because they play with the code and system that support it EVERYDAY! Im talking to managers, salesmen, and CEO's. The technology people in your company know your IT better than you, perios. They know what works, what doesnt, whats possible, and what directions are good. You should FIRST meet and ask them their ideas, THEN pull the trigger...not the other way around. Do that, and you are looking for trouble! Ive seen that scenario MANY times!
- Finally, and most importantly, when shopping for the killer application for your new Web-Based Portal, dont go on hype, readf or talk to people who use it everyday! Tahts the ONLY WAY TO KNOW if a CMS system is right for you. If you buy based on needs and others experience, you will pick the right system with no regrets, no matter how bad it most likely will end up being when the time comes to grow or move to the enxt system. If you buy or go with a system based on COST, or outsourced programmers who can build it cheaply, or you buy based on a salesmens hype or pitch, or based on a CEO's hype, or finincial backing by investors....any "arm twisting" that doesnt involve you USING YOUR HEAD, then you are out to be taken and most likely will pick a system that on the surface seems right, but later, you will regret it. Thats what has happened to Dallas. Dont buy based on cost or influence....buy based on honest evaluation and superior craftmanship.
Come on, would you buy a house with broken plumbing, bad electrical, and a cracked foundation, but you knew it was cheaper? Come on, would you really be happy living and using such a house? Would you use software that was that limiting and that problematic? Sure, looks good from the outside...but sure is rooten behind the walls! Would you mind "maintaining" that house to keep it liveable until you sell it yourself?
Such is the state of web-based content management development today....a bunch of rotten houses. They look good from the outside but all of them destined to be bulldozed at some point. Shame, they should have been built by innovative engineers given the respect,time and freedom to have been built the right way the first time! Shame on the businesses, salemes, CEO's and managers that dont understand that fact. Ten and twenty years from now, how many of these houses will be left standing. If you are a developer of web-based systems, will your house have the necessary organization are far-reaching usability and tools to stand the test of time and remain in this ever-changing market?
Would I get one of these open source web systems? Why not, its free. Would I keep it aorund as a long term strategy. HEll no......not me....only reason I would ever buy such a house is if I was going to bulldoze it and keep the property, or gut it, and thats what you will do EXACTLY when you buy one of the many poorly developed web based systems being built today. You will gut the software and what will be left when the smoke clears years from now, if you are lucky is the real value, if you are lucky....you're data...
- Mitchell Stokely, USA
