More frustrating than seeing research being duplicated is to see companies wasting huge amounts of resources on using the prototype and first version tools from Microsoft and Eclipse. I really don't get that: at least while they're learning about DSM for the first time, surely it's better to learn with a decent, stable tool, that removes all the low-level details?

It's like my wife, who just learned to drive. at the driving school she had a nice modern car to learn on, with automatic this and power-assisted that. Only after she had learned how to drive in general with that, was it sensible for her to move on to the more 'interesting' challenges presented by our 1987 VW Passat. Starting out with the Passat would have been a nightmare.

I understand perfectly that a company would want to save money -- after all, I bought the Passat for 450 euros, even though a better car wouldn't have broken the bank -- but I just can't see the savings when you take time into account. One company at the DSM workshop had been working with a team of four for 36 man months, just to get the first version of a DSM solution with Microsoft's tools. They expect to have to commit two people full time to maintaining the solution. Even among the largest MetaEdit+ customers, there isn't a single person who has to be devoted full time to maintaining the modeling tool. If you remember how precious a resource top expert developers are (and how much you have to pay them!), is it really sensible to be wasting these people's time on fighting bugs and reinventing the DSM tool support wheel? That's what the team above has had to do, since MS DSL tools have no support for linking information over several models -- something MetaEdit+ has had out of the box since day 1.

There -- now I'm moaning too! But I do think it's a different issue from the point of view of the student and the company. The student probably hardly loses out at all: most professors sadly won't notice, unless it happens to be their particular area, and so at least up to Master's level they can probably get away with it. Companies however are paying the cost every day. I have no problem if they decide that another tool is better for them, but they should at least do a proper investigation of what tools are available.

Our market research shows over 50% of expert developers in organizations building software for products know MetaCase's MetaEdit+ -- more than for Microsoft's and Eclipse's tools -- and a lot are working with it or looking at it, which is great. Given that the message has reached its target customers that well, what's the explanation of those who say they haven't heard, or have heard but not looked? If they're not interested in DSM (yet), that's fine -- but if they're serious enough that they're spending man-years on DSM, they might want to spend 1% of that time to save themselves 90% of it!