Jon Silver
Nov 3 · 2 min read

I don’t disagree with most of what you’ve written here.

I was a beta tester of Access 1.0 and the next several versions. I witnessed the JET database engine being given the Rushmore optimisation technology first developed by Dave Fulton’s team at Fox Software, which I’d also beta tested. And I was there at the birth of Exchange Server and its underlying data store based on JET. All this was the subject of many of my magazine articles and many press trips. I saw the roots of Access spread deeply into Microsoft’s strategic products very rapidly, before the company realised that the web was of any long term importance. Access even became a way to develop SharePoint 2013 applications through Access Services for SharePoint, whereupon the data would be stored natively in SQL Server tables. Corporate middle managers loved Access as a way of cobbling together little miniature departmental systems… much as Lotus 123 had been turned into macro-hell mini systems in the decade before by management accountants everywhere. And these systems were often massive, chaotic, cavernous, poorly documented brainchildren of just one semi-skilled over-ambitious individual who inevitably left or got promoted out of the picture leaving a vital but unmaintainable mess for the IT support department to try to maintain.

Dependency is hard to remove. Just look at paper… it’s still there in quantity in every office despite the paperless office being promised since forever (I remember the 1980s promises). Try to withdraw a product that’s turned into a platform… it’s far harder than just migrating users to a new piece of application software. There’s a reason there are still Access, Foxpro and spreadsheet macro systems alive out there in corporate land… replacing them requires an understanding of what those systems do, why they were created in the first place, and a reanalysis of the underlying business processes, user requirements gathering and eventually redevelopment. But when nobody’s around who remembers anything about them, it’s sometimes easier to just leave well enough alone and get a maintenance programmer contractor in when they break. Occasionally someone brave does the asking and the thinking, and pulls the plug. Eventually, like the black holes they resemble, these adhoc systems will all evaporate, and Access will be finally laid to rest.

    Jon Silver

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    R&D Director for JFDI Consulting Ltd. Old dog, new tricks. React enthusiast, full stack developer, IoT engineer, writer. Husband, father, uncle, skier.