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Comment by apenwarr | Hacker News Reader

True, it's a bit weird to think of a Microsoft product that way - but Access is a special case. Microsoft would dearly love to kill it and get everyone to migrate to MS SQL (and boy, do they push hard in that direction) but there are just too many satisfied users to let it die. So basically there's customer satisfaction in spite of their best efforts :)

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> So basically there's customer satisfaction in spite of their best efforts :)

That's funny, because you're in the exact same situation. You sort of wish people would stop using your product so that you could move on to doing something else. But that isn't going to happen because people need what you're offering so badly that they search the web until they find your product. Weather you make that easy for them or not.

Then again a product called "Access" is probably the most likely of any to be a special case.

seems to be very similar to apple's strategy on HyperCard - which apple probably deemed to be too powerful for rapidly writing applications and thus pulled it from the market. maybe this is a common strategy among large IT companies?

I've also noticed the ms sql server management studio to be fairly unintuitive (adding backups as drives, etc.) and I'm wondering whether the big players in IT might realize that future profits may not come from better software, but from the consulting/maintenance services that accompanies the software (following IBM's tracks).

EDIT: looking at the success of HyperCard/Access, that would probably be a great open source project. taking HyperCards approach to the web.

The other player in the space is Filemaker Pro - a fair bit nicer to work with than Access, although still fairly horrible from an internals point of view (I think they've moved to using proper SQL and everything since I last used it though).

I used to work for a web developer who worked on a well known campground company's site. We had a process that built static html pages out of an old Filemaker database and then synced them to a cluster of Windows web servers. That process has been in place since 2000 and there's no rush to change it because, frankly, it works pretty well.

I believe it started that way because our original developer didn't know anything else.

I briefly had the pleasure of working on a similar thing: it sticks out in my memory because the stack that ran the web site was entirely obsolete.

OS: Mac OS 9; DB: Filemaker Pro; templates: Lasso; webserver 4D WebSTAR.

This was in 2011.

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