[Commentary] Did you hear?

by David Workman
Data Mosaic, Inc.

You'd think the world ended over the weekend with the scuttlebutt that is going around (or at least landing in my inbox). "Filemaker says that Servoy is out of business." Who? What? Huh?

Well, OK. That makes sense. Sort of. If you're a Martian newly landed on earth for a holiday.

I haven't been that drunk myself recently so after several "investigative" emails (e.g. "Jan, get out of bed and get to work. I have a solution to test with 30 people this week and I need clarification on this "feature". Oh, and what's this about being out of business?") my disbelief was confirmed. The air conditioning unit (model Dutch ca. 1560) at Servoy headquarters is still turning.

Of minor interest is how this rumor got started. Apparently critical mass was reached at an FSA meeting in the U.K. last thursday (April 21, 2005) and the big bang was started when an FMI employee mentioned to an FSA member that they had "heard Servoy was out of business." (Or something close, I couldn't ferret out an exact quote.)

It seems that within moments (big bangs historically have a life span of a few milliseconds) every Filemaker developer in England "knew" that Servoy was out of business. I hereby present the country of England the most gullible country in the world award. Good for 90 days or until Tony Blair quits believing a thing George Bush says.

Who knew the Filemaker community was so good at...communicating? OK, so I did. I suspect FMI knows this as well. So was this a deliberate drop on FMI's part or just an honest case of "I heard that..." gone out of control?

Who knows. But since it is out there it strikes me that FMI needs to come up with better rumors to spread around. Here is a top 10 list to get their marketing department going:

RUMOR #10: working with complete separation of data from structure just ain't worth the hassle.

RUMOR #9: versioning is for sissies.

RUMOR #8: event driven interfaces are butt ugly.

RUMOR #7: bug spray is as good a debugger as you'll ever need.

RUMOR #6: your brain will balk like a rented mule as soon as it hears "JavaScript."

RUMOR #5: zero deployment is an evil scheme Sun cooked up to take over the world.

RUMOR #4: standards compliant means everyone in the world should speak english.

RUMOR #3: XML is a really cool buzzword.

RUMOR #2: just say no to the blue pill.

And my number 1 rumor suggestion is...

RUMOR #1: data corruption won't really make you cry like a baby.

There you have it folks. Just something I heard.