Software Business in the Middle East

I came to the stand on the exhibition of one company that might be our partner or competitor – it depends. The guys at the stand seemed to be very busy talking to each other, so I decided to make an experiment and see how much time they would need to notice that somebody is at their stand looking at the product materials and clicking on the button here and there on a demo computer.

They noticed me after 15 minutes. Several other visitors came to me with their questions during that time assuming I am a part of that company. It seems to be a nice idea – if your competitor does not pay much attention to the visitors, you can stay their talking about their product disadvantages

Today is the last day of Arab Health 2009 exhibition. The conference Information Technology in Healthcare takes place at the same time.

One of the topics discussed on the conference was e-claims in Healthcare, the way it is implemented in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. Person who was supposed to lead the e-claim workshop suddenly changed his plans, and I was asked to prepare this workshop instead within a few days.

The workshop lasted for about six hours – I never thought I would be able to speak for so long. I guess I used my talking limit for one month, so I will keep silent for a while

Here are presentation and workshop plan in case if anyone is interested in healthcare e-claims topic.

It is very simple – just buy useless and expensive software.

Last autumn we got an idea of a product that might be installed on a customer site having 1 to 20 concurrent users. We’ve been always working with Windows based applications and never with Web based, so we though why not to use this chance also to learn asp.net making our first Web based app. It might be a good experience, as we thought.

Searching the Internet we found a few web app generators that could generate a source code based on your database. IronSpeed looked as the best option, especially with their tables-in-table features. For example, you have table Customer and child tables for orders, payments and complaints. With such nice feature as table-in-table you could generate a web page to find a customer and for each customer record you could see separate tab with, let’s say, the customer’s last five orders orders, then a tab with five last payments, and a tab with five last complaints.

Everything looked excellent on IronSpeed’s screenshots. I have to admit that this software really has excellent design templates, so the generated pages looked really good.

The problem is that such nice feature as table-in-table is not available in a trial version. Neither have they money guarantee period, so you could get you money back if you don’t like the software.

But it seemed IronSpeed was pretty well-known company on web based program generators market, and I thought that people would not sell crap for about $2,000 (xa-xa), so we bought a license.

The software looked very nice. It generated everything I asked for with all table-in-table stuff. I changed one table-in-table – it looked excellent. Changed the second one – wait, the first one became as it was generated by default. Well, I changed the first table-in-table again. Then I changed the third table-in-table, and guess what – the first two became as they were generated by default. All my changes were gone or got completely messed up.

Finally, my project started showing .Net errors complaining that I used some variables without first initializing them, and it became simply impossible to work with the project.

During one month, after talking to IronSpeed support, I generated my program a few times, but I was not able to make it working properly. Maybe I was stupid enough not to admit some IronSpeed courses or webinars, but I assumed that software for such price would at least remember my changes and not mess up my web pages.

At that time I got e-mail from IronSpeed sales guy asking me to share our success story with them – he assumed we made another kick-ass product using their software. I told him about our situation telling him I was dreaming to get rid of this software. He answered they do not return any money back but agreed I could sell my license over ebay or somewhere else.

It’s just our experience, of course. IronSpeed has impressive list of customers, so I guess people like the product. Maybe, they do not use all the features, or they do not try changing table-in-table stuff a lot. Or we were just such unlucky.

But from now on:
1. If trial version of the software does not have the features I am looking for – no buy;
2. If company does not have at least two weeks money back guarantee – no buy.

Finally, we switched back to Win based development, and I actually have no idea when we will try doing something web based next time. Sad.

Have you ever had similar situations when you just wasted your money for nothing?