RE: Off Topic: TOAD becoming extinct in Australia

I'm in Canada: we had the same thing.  Someone wanted to cut software costs so they dropped Toad and have us using SQL Dev.  Plenty of the developers have identified how that's hurt their productivity in one form or another but the business minds just don't want to accept it.

And you're right it's pretty difficult to quantify.  How do you show a business mind whose eyes start to glaze over at the first hint of technical explanation that project X is equal to project Y and project Y only took longer to develop because of the toolset?  Worse: how do you eliminate all the other factors involved - such as the User Specs that need clarified - so you can do that?

To myself: it's an impossible uphill battle unless your management is technically experienced.

Point being: It's not just an Australian business mindset.  It's a blind spot I'd expect to find in non-technical managers anywhere in the world.  And I mean non-technical in the sense that they have no personal direct tech experience as developers.  A manager who has been managing a tech team for years without understanding the tech fits into that non-tech description.

Roger A. Simoneau
Systems Analyst
Alberta Blue Cross
(780) 498-8837

From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of r_squires
Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2012 10:02 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [toad] Off Topic: TOAD becoming extinct in Australia



I've worked for 3 of the major banking and investment companies in Australia now and they are all trying to remove TOAD from the workplace.

Its cost is always the main factor with management seeing 10s thousands of dollars in cost annually and hearing about Oracle's free SQL Developer and asking us to justify the cost. It's incredibly hard to quantify all of the little things TOAD provides that make it the best tool for the job, its just a few dollars a day but that's not how management see it.

As a big TOAD advocate I always get involved in the discussions around cost and its usefulness as a tool but as more and more people start to use SQL Developer and fewer of us TOAD users remain I suspect that probably in the next couple of years TOAD will no longer be used by many of these big organisations.

Is this just an Aussie thing or are other organisations looking at costs and paring back their use of TOAD?


________________________________
This communication, including any attached documentation, is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed, and may contain confidential, personal and/or privileged information. Any unauthorized disclosure, copying, or taking action on the contents is strictly prohibited. If you have received this message in error, please contact us immediately so we may correct our records. Please then delete or destroy the original transmission and any subsequent reply.