I Agree With Steve a.k.a How Many Clicks to Get to the Center of Visual FoxPro
A co-worker and friend Steve St. Jean remarked yesterday in a blog post about how much he loves Wikipedia. I have to agree. I find myself using it more and more. I use it not only to look things up such as the boiling point of NaOH but also to find out some info on the sunsetting of FoxPro by Microsoft.
I was working with a client yesterday who has a fair number of small FoxPro applications and we were discussing that Microsoft was sunsetting the product. I wasn't sure when the support actually ended. I started to go Google it or hit MSDN and find the FoxPro site then it hit me that even more efficient would be to lookup the Wikipedia entry on FoxPro. I had no doubt someone would have updated to mention the end of life of the product or at worst it would have a link directly to the Microsoft FoxPro site. Wikipedia didn't disappoint. At the bottom were just the VERY pertinent links I was looking for including an link to an eweek.com article titled "Microsoft Puts FoxPro Out to Pasture". Just what I needed.
Why didn't I go straight to Microsoft and search and find the product site page? Because once I got there I'd likely have to search around the page for a link to another page that contained the information I needed. I knew I could most likely get it much more quickly straight out of Wikipedia.
In fact, let's just go through that excercise. Here are the various screen I went through to first find the information on Microsoft site directly and then on Wikipedia. Also note that when I get to the home page for Visual FoxPro on Microsoft's site I still have to figure out what link may give me that info. Since this is very timely and relevant news it was easy to pick it out but I could have easily gone through a number of trys before finding the right information had this information not been so 'hot'.
Now the MSDN Screens (clicks):
Go straight to MSDN
Search for and get search results for FoxPro
Click through to the Visual FoxPro home page
Luckily the information I am after is very 'hot' and click through on the correct link out of the gate
Woohoo I have my information
Now for Wikipedia
Go straight to Wikipedia
Search for and get search results for FoxPro
Click though to the Visual FoxPro Wikipedia entry
Woohoo I have the info with a full cite to the original information on the Microsoft cite and a lot more information as well. All in one less click and it could have easily been many less clicks had the information I was seeking not been so current and 'hot'.
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