I have two, first from an internal client (one of the companies within Sun Microsystems) and the second from a company that fortunately didn't become a client. 1. We did a demo of the new product management system which finally took the entire product registration process from 15 minutes per part down to 30 per second. An executive from one of the operating companies didn't comment about the massive time savings, but rather argued that the "dummy data" were not the right product numbers for those type of parts. Really? Seriously?! come on... that is why it is "dummy data" 2. We had an Australian prospective client that spent $15,000 on a demo of the next generation of real estate management software for us to integrate some of their requirements into the product. The demo went brilliant and they were very impressed at which point they turned around and said "We want to be the first in the world to use this, can you ensure you haven't built this for anyone else?" it was followed immediately by the following sentence "Can you show us others in our industry already successfully using this software?" I thought they were joking, they were actually dead serious!!! They didn't go forward because they wanted to be first, but they didn't want to go forward unless others were already using it.

James Wallis Martin JB Metrics Ltd, Director www.jbmetrics.com www.erpthree.com

Up until yesterday, I hadn't noticed a difference between FF4 and FF5 (aka FF4.0.1) However, I have seen a stability problem which essentially not only locks up FF5 but also the whole computer when my 3-year old daughter tried to run some of her Nick Jr Flash games. Now many of the games were developed years ago (even prior to Flash 8) and unlike Google's sandbox of Flash (which catches the occasional crash from those games), Firefox 5 seems to do a worse job of handling the crashes.

James Wallis Martin JB Metrics Ltd, Director www.jbmetrics.com www.erpthree.com

First, the cost of having to support an EOL OS like XP. Make it only work on Vista and Windows 7, and you save money on support cost. Last I checked, Microsoft was a business, so wanting to say, "Hey, you want to make money from building Windows Phone 7 apps, have the decency to support us to by buying a latest version of our OS that we support". When did it become so one-sided that Microsoft should make it easier to develop on Windows 7 phones just because they screwed up big time on Windows Mobile 6? Otherwise, it would be just as fair an argument from those on DOS 3.3 demanding that if Microsoft is going to support an unsupported EOL OS like XP, why stop there? There are still plenty of large businesses and government agencies running on DOS machines (sad, but true - Don't believe me? Ask the New Zealand Health Board what they run the patient health records on.) Second, don't like that you have to get Vista or Windows 7, then I am sure Microsoft would happily suggest Android SDK. As for Microsoft's attempt to get people to upgrade, sounds like a smart move to tie it in with the development SDKs. I am not convinced that Windows Phone 7 is the right platform to put my development efforts at this stage, but requiring me to use a supported OS to use their SDK seems not only reasonable but appropriate.

James Wallis Martin JB Metrics Ltd, Director www.jbmetrics.com