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by woah
4269 days ago
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You're idealizing Access for reasons unknown. If there actually was demand for such a tool, one would exist and would be making a ton of money. The fact that people use off the shelf SaaS is an indication of the fact that off the shelf SaaS is what they want. My suspicion is that Access is too hard for most business people, yet not powerful enough for actual developers to make something unique with. Salesforce has made a huge business out of business apps in the same category as whatever would have been cobbled together in the basement with Access by some 'IT guy' 20 years ago. The fact that this is the case is a reflection of the fact that people prefer the hosted, turnkey, polished experience that web-based SaaS provides over some half-baked internal app. |
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Well, you might accept that I'm "idealizing" Access because, you know, I had a decent experience with it 20 years ago, as described in my first comment. No need to go searching for mysterious ulterior motives when they're explained in the post!
For what it's worth, I do remember significant flaws in Access. For one thing, it was an absolute pain when we wanted to modify the database - we had to get everyone to log off, and then upgrade all of the clients at once. This is one of those problems that the web solves elegantly. Also, Access had major issues with concurrent users. Performance fell off a cliff, and from memory, certain operations were unsafe (I think you could set up a SQLServer which would address the concurrency problems, but we never bothered).
But these days we have better options available to us - app stores fix the updating problem, without introducing the css + html + javascript mess. We have decent, free web servers, and web application frameworks such as Django and Rails that make writing the server side code that drives the RESTful APIs used by the client relatively easy. But what we don't have is:
a) an easy way to create a server (this needs to be as easy as sharing an Excel spreadsheet) b) a coherent development environment from client to server code. Something that allowed you to write apps purely in Javascript (no css or html) with a GUI editor, and which also let you write the server code in node.js would be a close match to what I'm thinking of. Bonus points if most of the node.js code is derived from the client-side code, so that the novice programmer doesn't need to be aware that a server even exists, it just works.
The problem is, that's the kind of application that's really hard to write. It's big, an IDE in fact, and really Microsoft is the only game in town for making that sort of stuff. But they won't write Android / iOS / Mac clients, so it doesn't happen.