Lou,
I am requesting that you take down your extremely damaging negative Google review. What you are saying is simply not true.
This was never a fixed price contract.
We were not given the latest source code.
Prior to taking on the assignment, we were not told this was running under UNIX.
Our approach to converting FoxPro to .NET involves considerable work before any conversion begins. We were working to minimize the amount of manual programming needed. Below is a partial list of work done that was needed before the auto convert code could be executed:
At the time you stopped work, we were close to the point where we would pull all of these programs together to complete the work.
Unfortunately, when we took this assignment on, we did not know that your system was running in UNIX. We had never worked in UNIX. When we discovered this fact in the spring of 2021, we purchased a computer dedicated to your system with a virtual machine running on it to enable us to run FoxPro for SCO UNIX.
We lost considerable time because of this. Your program makes extensive use of the readkey(). The readkey() values returned in the UNIX system appear to be different from those in a Windows system. We also had to learn how to navigate in a UNIX environment which was extremely time-consuming.
As it turned out, the source code provided to us was not the latest version. In September 2021, we decided to decompile the executable currently being used. Unfortunately there were two files that would not decompile. We used a tool called
Re-Fox. The output appeared to be encrypted to me. This was a mistake on my part. I contacted the owner of Re-Fox and asked her to take a look. She advised me that she had put a 500,000 byte limit on what could be decompiled. She changed her program and now the two files could be decrypted.
As a goodwill gesture, I told you I would waive all hours related to this mistake as well as reduce our rate by 50% for the balance of the project.
We were much closer to completing this project than I think you believed. Almost all of the preliminary work needed to very quickly automatically convert most of the code was done.
Let me explain it this way. Suppose we have a conversion project that would take 1000 hours to do manually. And suppose we spent 500 hours to create an autogen program that required only 100 manual hours to complete the work. At 500 hours it appears that not much has been done, but in fact, only 100 more hours were needed.
If we had been given the latest source code in the first place, we would have completed this sooner. If we had been told that the system was running on a UNIX platform, our estimate would have been higher. In fact, we may not even have taken on the project.
Below is the content of our online response to your review:
We are accused of overpromising, underdelivering, not completing the
project, and having “no clue”. We are limited to 4000 characters in our
response and we need many times that to properly respond. We will
fully respond at erwcp dot com/moreinfo.
We made a mistake in understanding the architecture of the program.
We advised our client that not only would we waive all hours associated
with that mistake but that we would finish the project at half our usual
rate.
Our services were terminated and then two months later this review was
posted. Last week one of my programmers brought it to my attention.
We have never had an online complaint, so we were not looking for one.
We have had no new business in the past three months. I am reasonably
certain this review is the reason. We get lots of traffic. We
inexplicably lost three very large contracts.
“No clue”: We have been in this business for 41 years and very much do
know what we are doing. We have many great references at erwcp dot
com/references. Here are just a few:
“Wes is the Best in the world for FoxPro custom programming.”
Jerry Singh, owner, rtilabs.com
“ERW and Wes. It has turned out to be one of the best decisions I have
made!!”
David Moyar
Assistant General Manager, Humble Machine Works, Inc., Houston, TX
“ERW Custom Programming is a company you can trust to be your partner.”
Jeffrey Gilow
Director of Systems and Telecom, United Road Towing, Inc., Mokena, IL
“I am writing to let you know how pleased we are with our new ERW
computer program. We appreciate the ongoing support … and look forward
to maintaining contact with ERW in the future.”
Owner
Food Wholesaler and Distributor
“Wes, I am so pleased with your responsiveness. When I email you, I know
the next call will be you.”
Owner
Environmental Testing Lab
“Your work has been excellent, on time and within budget.”
Manager of Information Systems
Van Rental Company
“Wes is a dedicated and loyal individual who gives his ALL to fulfill our
PC needs.”
PC Support Manager. GM Tech Center
“I am writing you to tell you how pleased we are with our new program. It
works above and beyond our expectations. I must say what a lucky guy you
are to have such a great team all working for ERW.”
Project Manager
Convention & Show Services (convshow dot com)
“Overpromise”: At no time did we guarantee the cost or the delivery time.
The program has over 100,000 lines of code. The best we can do is give
our best educated guess when the project begins and as it progresses.
“Underdeliver”: We automatically convert as much of the code as
possible. This is what makes us so competitive. Going into this
project we had thousands of lines of auto-convert code that would be
used on this project – no charge for this. The real work involves
finding programming techniques or patterns that we have not yet
encountered and writing auto-convert code to handle them.
“Did not complete”: The client stopped work.
We promised to convert the program to C#.NET. We were keeping our
promise.