Innovate or die

There has been a lot of soul searching lately with several people questioning the continued fanatical support for the U2 (Universe/Unidata database) market when there are limited jobs and many unemployed programmers.  The problem in my belief is two fold.

First, are there companies you work for or have worked for changing for better or giving lip service?  The latter is probably more like it.  They think green screen entry worked in the 80's and the 90's it should work today.  Why spend the money refreshing the interface when it does not change the underlying code. They could not be more wrong.  As they say in the food business: presentation is everything.  You don't look at a runway model and look at his or her brain, of course not.  So why are so many managers so obsessed with the latest thing when they have the greatest database and software in front of them?  Because, we have not changed the front end in thirty years.  Let us gussy up the character interface with a lovely browser interface with tabs, grids, hypertext links, colors, and drag and drop features.  Watch those manager eyes go bonkers when they see what you can do with Universe and Unidata databases.

Secondly, we the worker bees are happy to be employed and not worrying about what we produce.  How many times have you been given a project to fix or create and hacked the code rather than re-write?  Just guessing here but there have been a lot that I know of.  Take one of the projects you are given, find a open source tool or free trial, and write it on your own time with a browser front end.  Show your manager you have this amazing skill set and what applications can look like.  Of course, it may fail, but you have try in order to fail.

I have been pushing U2logic since 1998 when I knew that if we did not change from being a contract shop to an innovated shop we would be dead in the water.  I started with, which turned out to be an awful idea, to take a green screen application and remake in wIntegrate GUI.  Then we moved on to RedBack IDE which was okay at the time as long as you had IE 4.  From there we moved to RedBack Open using Microsoft IIS server.

The year is 2004.  I look around and the current owner of U2  have done nothing with the database or the tools they have acquired like SB+ and RedBack.  There have been just incremental improvements nothing radical to capture the market excitement.  So what's a boutique software house to do:  create their own tools.  Yep, that is what we have done.  We have a middleware called U2WebLink that replaced RedBack.  We wrote XLr8Designer and XLr8Object editor to allow you to create web pages like no other software company in the world.

I believe we have been on the innovated treadmill and we have been pushing the limit as well with our new feature of continuous compile for our Eclipse based code editor called XLr8Editor.  U2logic is not on the bleeding edge but we are very close.