A lesson from Lotus 1-2-3 (Post: Steven Black)

From 2003:

I spent several days with a guy with a PhD in Operations Reseach from Stanford, and a internationally recognized specialist in transportation modeling, who was putting together a proposal to write a scheduling system for Canada's entire railroad network. Using what, you may ask? Using Lotus 1-2-3 version 1.x for DOS.....

...Lotus, it turns out, is plenty powerful to do the job. A killer was several versions into the project, when both Lotus and Excel became so bloated on the Windows platform that they just couldn't grind the mega-models anymore. Who knew? I bet that, before you read this epilogue paragraph, you thought you knew what the failure modes were. It was bloat, Bob. Now replace "Lotus 1.x for DOS" with ".NET" and realize that you don't have any control whatsoever over your life going forward. That boat ride (bloat ride?) is a billion-dollar illusion by a bunch of hacks who peddle technology with little or no insight into applications. No more, no less...

...Today's cool deal is *always* tomorrow's legacy nightmare...

...I reckon 80% of all .NET developers are taking a product that they know fundamentally little about and creating applications based on snippets of code they find in books and on the web. All of which were written by near-rookies at best. Those chickens, your chickens, will someday come home to roost.