Rob,

This is not about your personally. Neither it's about OCX itself. If it's
possible to make a quality product with OCX, why not, really? The only odd
thing, is that relying on proprietary specs is a royal pain in the rear. If
marketing suit at Redmond decides that `ConnectDB' doesn't sound innovative
and changes it to `EstablishDBConnection', you'll need to change all your
code. However, this ain't a big deal, just do Find&Replace or run PERL on it.
But what if they decide to add a `feature' and connect your customer's
machine to www.microsoft.com when you call thet function? What if your
customer is on radio link with foreign traffic paid separately? Bulletproof,
anyone? :)
As to prosperity vs existence.... Currently, my pray is for IB to survive.
And there's a long way to go before the harvest can be gathered. It may take
long months if not years for developers to familiarise themselves with code,
and for the whole project to gain credibility. Anyways, I can't envision
myself eating from gold right the next day it's open. Most likely I won't
ever, but that's another story :)
Being an elite is killing. It's not only required to keep on learning all the
way. Another point is an ability to produce something of high quality. No
matter what, indeed- shoes, poetry or software. My OS analogy would be UNIX.
It's said that `UNIX is user-friendly, it's just concerned of who its friend
is'.


Edward V. POPKOV
Independent Developer

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