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back to article IFTTT isss notttt afraiddd offf Microsofttt Flowww

Microsoft's rival to IFTTT, Flow, formally emerged last week – after some months in beta – but the scripting outfit has no intention of giving up its lead. IFTTT has "platformised" itself in response, opening up the runtime to app developers in August, and now professional services. Last week B2B service providers were invited …

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  1. Voland's right hand Silver badge
    Trollface

    So in addition to "business critical" untested badly written Exel we will now have a choice of similarly "business critical" untested badly written IFTTT or Flow. Neither one of them having any resemblance of use cases, design, formalized testing, release or revision control.

    Isn't life wonderful...

    3 1 Reply
    1. Pascal
      Reply Icon
      Trollface

      It's fine however because the marketing / business person that created the Flow "App" will also handle support and issues for it, and won't escalate it to IT.

      2 0 Reply
    2. Erik4872
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      ""business critical" untested badly written Exel"

      Exactly. I have done IT work at very large companies, and the reality is that almost all department-level number crunching and lots of critical processes depend on creaky stuff like Excel macros written back in the Office 97 era, and Access database "applications." Take that, and throw in a dependency on an online script processing engine.

      "We have such sights to show you...."

      1 0 Reply
      1. martinusher Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Excel 97 -- How Dare You!

        The problem with Excel 97 -- in fact the entire Office 97 suite -- is that it actually works rather well. The only way to improve it is to do what everyone does these days which is to repackage, bloat and kill off compatibility. In real life software doesn't wear out, unlike physical equipment, so if a program's doing a job then it can continue to do that job indefinitely. (Computers don't need to be connected to the 'net for many functions)(although much modern software demands it 'for business reasons').

        (Since I work with 'real' computers, including doing odd bits of scripting, I find the Lego Mindstorms approach to writing software for IFTTT needlessly verbose and unduly restrictive. After all, IFTTT is just a subset of if/then/else, an everyday construct in all procedural languages.)

        0 1 Reply
        1. Ian 55
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          Re: Excel 97 -- How Dare You!

          Pity its stats functions were complete crap, eh? (And stayed that way until Excel 2010, when they became merely somewhat dubious in the corners.)

          0 0 Reply
      2. A K Stiles
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        Facepalm

        Office 97 Era

        Ha! a previous life (About 7 years ago) had me supporting legacy Foxpro databases and a lotus-123 macro based spreadsheet, created, for attendance recording, by some (non-IT, beancounter) body who had left years previously, and the department *HAD* to track their staff time to the minute and it *HAD* to be done using this 'system' which now had nobody to support it. No, it can't be replaced with something else 'cos "the staff won't know how to use it"...

        0 0 Reply
  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    REXX

    Surprising how many times REXX (AREXX when I was using it) gets reinvented.

    4 0 Reply

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