Coghead R.I.P - Sad but expected

Sad to read the news from InformationWeek about

SAP Buys Cloud Computing Startup Coghead

"Coghead's service continues through April, but SAP will shut customer obligations and relationships down after that. "

One of the high profile players in the dynamic business application platform is quitting soon. Even though this is a unfortunate case, but I think this is hard to avoid for Coghead base on my comments to our Strategy Committee in middle of last year below,

Coghead has very high profile, but very lousy result I would say. They spent 5 years (since May 2003) with big support to reach this stage which is still far to what the CEO is saying, "tech-savvy business people who have never before had access to an easy-to-use, do-it-yourself solution to their application needs. ", as compare to what we have achieved in less than 6 months time with such a limited resources.

I tried to create a simple checkbook application from scratch. The user experience was lousy. The tool looks good in demo, but when put my hands on it, it is not as shown.

The Form Editor tool was not easy to use, even simple task like resize the fields and reposition them as I want using mouse. You cannot use mouse to resize, but have to manually type in the width in a field hide behind the Widget tab. After changed the width, I tried to reposition 2 fields side by side, but the system rejected it and reverted the field size that I have changed to original size. After few tries, still cannot put my Account Type and Account Number fields side-by-side.

They use BPEL for the Action and process flow, which is a good thing, but the tool again is not easy to use. I can't figure out how to do a simple business rule like negative value check. When I made mistake, it just prompted me the system error and didn't suggest me what's wrong with my Action. I don't think business user can use this tool.

Finally, save the Action, and tried to create a new record to save, and I got this message.



At the end, I can't even complete a Bank account setup screen.

In short, they are not ready or even close to develop software or application development tool for business user.