PowerBasic - will it recover or is the Air out?

Started by Theo Gottwald, December 06, 2012, 09:40:33 PM

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Chris Holbrook

Perhaps the PowerBASIC website is keeping office hours EST.
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Theo Gottwald


Patrice Terrier

Theo--

This disorganization doesn't give much confidence...
And it is kind of answer to the question you have been asking in the title of this thread.

Quote"Un seul être vous manque et tout est dépeuplé"
Lamartine

...
Patrice Terrier
GDImage (advanced graphic addon)
http://www.zapsolution.com
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Theo Gottwald

Today i thought "If Bob had been there, it would not have been happened like this."
I would expect an explanation, some official statements ... something that makes us believe that there is somebody who cares.
Now people report that even the mail bounces.

Good we have Jose's Forum.

Chris Holbrook

Strange things can happen when key people leave the scene (for whatever reason). Third parties can be difficult. We should not rush to judgement.
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Eric Pearson

Patrice --

Maybe I remember things differently, but I always thought that Bob was very brusque when dealing with BBS outages.  And customers in general.  He probably hired people like him.

> but is he a skilled programmer?

It will take a lot more than a good coder to run PowerBASIC.  We should be hoping for a good businessman, somebody who understands the PowerBASIC market, and lots of other things.  We won't know if he is the right person until we can say "the company didn't fail after Bob died"  How long will that take?  You may as well make a pot of coffee.

Guys, as far as I know PowerBASIC had exactly two things of great value: Bob's brain, and a loyal customer base.  Now they have only one.  They probably don't want to offend their most loyal and vocal customers.  So maybe they can't say anything yet.  How long does it take to appraise and sell a company?  Maybe negotiation are still in progress, maybe they are looking for an investor, maybe they are interviewing people... who the hell knows?  Maybe THEY don't know anything yet.

I have no insider information about this. I'm as in the dark as you are.  Considering the ongoing business relationship between PowerBASIC and Perfect Sync, think about that.

-- Eric
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Eric Pearson

Theo --

> Now people report that even the mail bounces.

PB runs its own web server "in house".  When that server is down, emails bounce.

-- Eric
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Guenter Fuessner

It seems that almost nobody on this board knows enough about Jim Bailey at this time to say more about the future of PowerBasic Inc.
If you look at his twitter account then we can learn that he characterize himself as a "Conservative Activist". If you read some of his tweets where he expressed his opinion, did read the warning yesterday against Patrice in the PB-Forum, for just making his opinion public (and no Beta-Details!), did see that Jim Bailey edited Tom's forum entry describing his relation to Bob Zale, find no serious information at any place about the ongoing problems with the PB-Forums, I feel that Eric is right with his opinion:
Quote"Maybe I remember things differently, but I always thought that Bob was very brusque when dealing with BBS outages.  And customers in general.  He probably hired people like him."
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David Roberts

Booted this morning and got "not found on this server" so disabled OpenDNS and then got a timeout. I put the kettle on.  :)
QuotePerhaps the PowerBASIC website is keeping office hours EST.
They may be working out of a tent.  :)
QuoteWe should not rush to judgement.
In twelve hours, for me, this fiasco will have been going on for a week with downtime exceeding uptime.

Each time the site has been up there has been an opportunity to say something. Eric said: "So maybe they can't say anything yet." Saying nothing is not damage limitation best practice.

"Some of you may be pulling your hair out this week. If it is any consolation, so are we. Bear with us folks, we will get there."

That has told us nothing but it does say, as Theo wrote, "something that makes us believe that there is somebody who cares."

As Stephen Hawking said on one of the Pink Floyd's albums: "Keep talking"

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Patrice Terrier

#69
Guenter--

Quotedid read the warning yesterday against Patrice in the PB-Forum, for just making his opinion public

I have always been a problem for Bob, because i am using several programming tools.

He kept me in the beta team, only because i was pushing PB to the limit, but our 20 years relation has always been tumultuous.
Some of his PM to me, are true pieces of anthology, due to his "very thin skin".

He has always been upset by the existence of this forum and especially by this thread:
http://www.jose.it-berater.org/smfforum/index.php?topic=1129.0

But all in one, i always been faithful to him, because PowerBASIC is such a little gem when it comes to create tiny fast DLL, especially those requiring real time processing.

...
Patrice Terrier
GDImage (advanced graphic addon)
http://www.zapsolution.com
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Paul Squires

Quote from: Patrice Terrier on December 14, 2012, 12:39:23 PM
He has always been upset by the existence of this forum and especially by this thread:
http://www.jose.it-berater.org/smfforum/index.php?topic=1129.0

I got a similar blast from him a couple of years ago when I made a "disparaging remark about DDT" in one of my FireFly sales ads. The text was not malicious and only indicated that DDT was limiting versus SDK. Nonetheless, I quickly changed the text (and apologized) but lo and behold the next day I got very nasty emails from him digging up snippets from some of my posts over the past *10 years* wherever I mentioned the power of SDK over DDT. The man could not accept apologies, nor could he objectively see two sides of a disagreement. If he wanted a fight then by God he would fight tooth and nail until he hammered you into the ground. I learned a valuable lesson after that encounter. I respected him as a programmer but was very leary in dealing with him on any other level.

When Bob found out that the new FireFly Visual Designer product was also now tied to a private, members/customers only forum, he lost it. He went ballistic on me during a telephone conversation with him. He told me that the only reason for the private forum was so that I could hide malicious conversations about PB without him or PB staff seeing it. Think about that. Why in the world would I create a private forum with 100% PB and FireFly customers just to bash PB? I would be killing my own market immediately. The man was somewhat paranoid or at the very least way too overly sensitive and hot tempered. Once you got on his bad side then I don't know if you could ever get into his good graces again. The private forum was created merely to prevent FireFly software pirates from getting free support. Nothing more. Nothing less.

He was a great programmer though and even though I doubt that we would have been best friends hanging out with food and drink, I do miss him.

I am very surprised that PB has not posted something in Jose's forum explaining what's going on. Some of the strongest supporters of PB come here every day (some of us every hour).  :)   I have sent an email to Jim Bailey asking a few questions. If he answers and allows me permission to share then I will update people here with what I've learned.




Paul Squires
FireFly Visual Designer SQLitening Database System JellyFish Pro Editor
http://www.planetsquires.com
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Guenter Fuessner

Patrice--
Paul--

it seems that more than one of us did make the same experiences and share the same view.

It is my hope that PowerBasic Inc. will change some of the old business politics and show their customers that there will be a valid future for PowerBasic and show into what direction Powerbasic will be heading under new ownership and/or control.
Maybe I'm expecting too much - in that case, maybe PowerBasic is expecting too much from the existing customer base.

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Eros Olmi

Quote from: Guenter Fuessner on December 14, 2012, 01:51:04 PM
Patrice--
Paul--

it seems that more than one of us did make the same experiences and share the same view.

List me in the club.
Can you imagine how many mails I got from him about thinBasic programming language having a syntax so close to PB compiler?
But in my case he has always been opened to discussion about my interpreter and never tried to really stop me going on. He was much more upset about my forum having people talking bad about PB.


Quote from: Paul Squires on December 14, 2012, 01:13:55 PM
He was a great programmer though and even though I doubt that we would have been best friends hanging out with food and drink, I do miss him.
I'm feeling the same.
thinBasic Script Interpreter - www.thinbasic.com | www.thinbasic.com/community
Win7Pro 64bit - 8GB Ram - Intel i7 M620 2.67GHz - NVIDIA Quadro FX1800M 1GB
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Theo Gottwald

#73
Shortly after somebody "Has gone" all people praise the person as usual, and if some time goes by, we remember also that this person had - like anybody - also some bad sides.
I also have some mails from Bob that he would not want me to share.

Having a genius in some part of the brain often comes with less intelligence in another.
I can not take me out from this. Possibly none of you all will call me to repair your car.

If i see how fast the actual PB Compiler works, its amazing each time, when i press compile.
And thats exactly what i want remember from Bob.


Those who knew Bob, knew all his sides and most often also knew how to get around with it.

Imagine somebody was a great mathematician, while stil drinking too much from time to time.
And while drinking too much, this has an influence on personality (while not immediately on mathematics).
So the world may remember his formulas and hopefully forget about his other unwanted behavior.

This the right way to go especially with people that are personally not more able to defend themselves.

So lets face the fact that now PB also has some chances they may not have had before because of such  behavior. There is a real chance for them to more incorparate user contributions and concentrate their own powers on core bussines.

It has never made sense to make own include files after those from Jose (and Jose as person...) was available.
It was just a lot of wasted time.
Now we see Visual Designers like Firefly 3.6 and (if it becomes stable) Phoenix that will beat not only competition in the PB Market but could even get respect from "outside".

To just ignore that and try to make an own skeleton VD and own "Incomplete" include files that is what i believe is wasted time.

Instead they should contract with those people that are ready to contribute.
They can influence the design a bit, help with testing, and then sell alltogether as a package.

PB is just not large enough to "alone" compete in the growing software market with any month increasing competition anywhere.

Concentrating their power on what they can do best - that is the compiler - would be the best answer to this situation. As  I see it.

After we have Jose's CWindow Class and Wrappers, we may need some better explanations on how it works, but we may not urgently need new DDT systems. As long as other features that are need in the compiler are missing.

The DDT as it is there can stay, it doesn't cost a thing. However from windows 8 surfaces will develop away from the old structures and a small company trying to follow that development will get terribly lost. Thats my impression.

José Roca

For wathever reason, he was always nice to me and never had any dispute.
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