Lup Yuen Lee 李立源 @lupyuen@qoto.org

@lupyuen I think this soured a lot of developers on UML. The use cases IBM was selling were drastically different than Rational's past focus for Rose. We were constantly asked by customers if Rose was going EOL and we were told to lie about it for some time.

Their UML user base shifted away from software devs towards MBAs, people interested in expert knowledge capture & modeling workflows.

I found it all disconcerting and no one seemed to like or want to evangelize the new rubric.

@lupyuen I was there when IBM acquired Rational c2002, which followed a Rational courtship with Microsoft. #lookingforbuyers

Rose was something of a legend, but Rational wanted to sell themselves using their paramour's IDE as the vehicle (or bait). So in quick succession we got XDE (for Visual Studio) and RAD (for WSAD/Eclipse).

XDE and RAD remained hot messes for years, and the IBM acquisition meant both XDE & Rose got sidelined.

@lupyuen "This meant that one would regularly be in a room of 20 people arguing over definitions, with at most 1 or 2 people realistically capable of translating the outcome of the discussion into rigorous (or, perhaps more accurately, semi-rigorous) semantics — and probably only the same 1 or 2 people capable of fully understanding the results."

Having been involved with several standards, that sounds painfully familiar. If you're unlucky, the room is dominated by one of the other 18.