Behind the Headlines

One of the unsung facets of working reasonably up in the org structure of a large, successful tech company is that you get a unique view of how the tech media machine works.

Tech writing (like Tech Marketing) is hard, because 1) Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, 2) Only magicians really understand the magic, and 3) Magic skill != writing skill. So, back in those ol' days, I wasn't that surprised to find that media pieces often originated in the Marketing departments of big companies, but I am always surprised when media outlets appear to run the Marketing feed unedited.

As a sign that some of the old ways still prevail, today we have the following two, loosely-coupled headlines: Vista success hinges on developers and Developers take advantage of Vista. A nice two-headline tautology.

I'm sure both headlines are valid, but looking at things that shallowly completely misses what's going on in software right now. OEM Agreements guarantee Vista's success - things might be better if developers come aboard, but Vista should do just fine (on every new machine shipped) even if they don't.

This was probably true even back in 2001, when Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer famously cried 'Developers! Developers! Developers!'), but it really doesn't bear up to scrutiny today. In 20-odd years of mass-market windowed software development, Zawinski's Law (*"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."*) - has basically held, and now even the simplest "mainstream" apps offer a staggering amount of functionality.

In the desktop software world, probably 95% of all usage is performed using about a half-dozen applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Browser, Itunes, IM Client). Even if all the developers stay home, that still means that Vista will lose functionality only at the remaining 5% margin.

There are two things worth drawing from the articles: 1) We'll see better software on the Vista platform if developers flock to Vista, but Vista's success does not depend on that flocking, and 2) if you are writing software today you have to be mindful that most (95%, if you accept the guesstimated figure above) of the "horizontal software space" is already filled.

That's not to say that there's not room for great new software, only that great new software isn't going to take a piece of the current pie -- the only way to create great new software is to make the pie bigger.

In a later post, I'll talk about models for doing just that.

Great Management Books: The Innovator's Dilemma, and The Godfather

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I've always liked Clayton Christensen's book 'The Innovator's Dilemma' as a metaphor to explain product innovation and succession. To vastly oversimplify the main idea, companies get so good at "hammering" that everything: screws, rivets, staples, welds, etc. is either treated as a "nail" or crushed in favor of "nails."

Software is an industry that produces natural monopolies, and so for software The Innovator's Dilemma applies, not just to individual companies, but to the entire industry.

This makes things really hard for software developers today. Microsoft, with Windows started out as a system for non-networked individual devices, and has tried to expand all the way up to clustered 'mainframe' solutions. Enterprise Java started out trying to boil the ocean, boiled it, only to find that ocean-boiling solutions aren't of much use when all you want is a cup of hot water for soup. In trying to solve the same universe of problems, both the Microsoft and Java camps have adopted the same set of ills. One size doesn't fit all.

In this case of two increasingly over-engineered systems, I prefer openness, not because of what you can add, but because of what you can take away. The key ratio for software managers to watch I call the "overhead ratio" which is (Time spent on the solution the customer will pay for) / (Total time spent). The ideal solution would have a quick installation, rapid configuration, and rapid user iterations to a state of solution-ness that is "just right." The ideal development effort will spend all its time on "value-add" components, and none on "configuration."

Both Microsoft and Java development have a pretty onerous overhead ratio - getting all the components right takes an increasingly long time. As I've previously noted, I like 'virtual appliances', and the "Convention, not Configuration" mantra of Rails/Grails for just this reason.

But there's more to it that that, a notion that I'll posit as The Godfather's Law: "Technology components that reach a sufficient level of irritation are made to SIMPLY DISAPPEAR." Credit Mario Puzo with this:

"As soon as the Corleone Family set up their usual business liaison with the local police force they were informed of all such complaints and all crimes by professional criminals. In less than a year Long Beach became the most crime-free town of its size in the United States. Professional stickup artists and strong-arms received one warning not to ply their trade in the town. They were allowed one offense. When they committed a second they simply disappeared.*"

Software licensing is a headache? BING - SaaS.
MS Shop that doesn't run Linux? BANG - Virtual appliances.
No (MS) or overcomplicated (EJB) ORM? - BOOM - Hibernate.

...and so on. As the best software people are 'Lazy, Impatient, and Hubristic' (a description that also fit Sonny Corleone), no system of excessive overhead ratio will last long. One key to software success is to figure out when a paradigm is about to get "bumped off", and to move in on all the action when it happens.

There is a great opportunity for software development organizations who can surf the transition. The key is not in choosing the "next Java" or hot development environment, but in identifying all of the barriers to adoption and making them "simply disappear." Even if they might agree on nothing else, the two "C's" (Christensen and Corleone) would agree here.

Prediction #12: Rise of the (virtual) machines

Make it 12! Predictions and Snowfall

Might as well start with the snowfall first: another twelve inches on the ground today. We've fallen into a pattern - Thursday = storm starts, Friday = storm ends and some chunk of the day is spent digging out. Only a foot today, so maybe the weekly effect is damping out.

But on to my final prediction for 2007 - the Year of the Software Appliance.

I'm working on Pikaplanner, a lean manufacturing application that's designed to be run in a hosted environment. I have a great setup for it, with custom gems installed and a beta version of a hyper-fast Ruby virtual machine. It works great for me, but moving it to a hosting provider has proved problematic.

At this point in our malware-infested world, installing anything new anywhere is a risky proposition. Installing enterprise software can also be time-consuming: back in the day for a decent-size Oracle apps installation you would want to set aside a full week just to get the software installed.

All of these problems (custom environments, malware, and difficult installs) are remedied by the concept of a software appliance. Illustrative of the SA concept, Digium this week announced the release of it's Asterisk VOIP PBX as a software appliance. Asterisk is a terrific product -- an open source (free as in beer) IP switching system. This monumental breakthrough in cheap communications systems has seen rapid growth, limited only by the difficulty of getting linux and telephony setup and configured by mere mortals.

Enter the software appliance - a bundle that includes the operating system, all the extra packages needed, and the VOIP switch software all pre-configured and delivered to be run virtual player environment. A tricky install becomes a simple, 30-minute exercise.

This is revolutionary -- VMware (popular maker of virtualization products, recently acquired by EMC) products are generally already well-accepted in corporate IT departments, and encapsulated applications take a lot of the risk out of new software deloyments. SO ... if you want my Pikaplanner (complete with customized environment), all I need to do is package it up, lock, stock and barrel, and deliver it as a software appliance. The "tricky install" and "customer environment" problems are solved in one fell swoop.

A software appliance is completely contained within its virtual environment, so if you're worried about security, just throw the appliance away and start again!

That's really only the beginning. If you write linux-based applications and need to deliver them in a Windows-only environment, just package up an appliance and run it in a virtual space on that Windows machine.

I can barely scratch the surface here, but VMWare turbocharged the software-appliance idea with their VMWare Player, Xen is white-hot in pursuit of the same idea, and the force of it is so powerful that even Microsoft has to conform to it..

Billy on Open Source has some terrific writings on the software appliance idea. There's a lot more to discuss here, so for now I'll leave my final prediction that "2007 is the year of the software appliance."

Bonus Prediction: REST ye merry!

Prediction: APIs rule, and REST will come to rule APIs in 2007

Google rules the Web 2.0 world. They are the alpha and the omega, from Google Maps (which popularized Ajax and got the whole thing started back in 2005) to being the primary acquirer and exit strategy for many Web 2.0 companies. Google is also the whole alphabet in between, and their publishing of APIs for their applications re-ignited the "mash-up" concept from Web 1.0, and changed the face of web apps we see today.

Google is wise and omnipresent, but they aren't omniscient. Back in 2002, when the current round of API design decisions were made, Google had the choice of creating an API in well-known media-darling SOAP, or the little known academic paper-protocol REST. They chose SOAP. Not that SOAP was such a bad choice, but with the benefit of hindsight Google is now heading in another direction, and Yahoo has already reached the promised land.

SOAP (originally Simple Object Access Protocol) was a neat idea -- to replace the bulk and complexity of integration schemes such as CORBA with a simple combination of XML and HTTP. Great idea, but to provide fully-functional enterprise integration SOAP had to expand, eventually absorbing much of the complexity of the protocols it meant to replace.

Enter REST. Representational State Transfer is the brainchild and 2000 PhD dissertation of Roy Fielding. Fielding observed that one of the great advantages of the HTTP specification (of which he was also a contributor) was that the client-server, stateless, cacheable, and layered design made access and architecture for the specification straightforward. REST extends these concepts to application-application communication. Very broadly, REST maps the basic CRUD operations (create, retrieve, update and delete) to familiar HTTP operations (POST, GET, PUT, and DELETE). As an additional conceptual benefit, these operations also map analogously to the database operations INSERT, SELECT, UPDATE, and DELETE.

Boiled down, the idea is to have applications interact through conceptually simple HTTP access for exchange of resources -- remote resources, as opposed to remote procedure calls. API creation is then a breeze, because the access methods are already broadly familiar, and the receiving applications need only be ready to respond to requests based on the request information in the HTTP header - say for HTML (web pages), JavaScript (Ajax requests) or XML (application requests). Ruby on Rails has good REST support now (through the SimplyRestful plugin) and will have REST as a part of the core going forward.

In the Ruby/Rails world, URL's are beautiful and informational, and one of the downsides of REST are URLs that are more machine- than human-readable. Still, as applications are increasingly designed with integration and mashup in mind, you can expect REST to rise in prominence in 2007.

Predictions for 2007

Since a new year beckons, and this is a blog, it follows that predictions for the new year must follow. Hey, rules are rules. And so, with no further adieu, here are my predictions for 2007:

Easy Calls:

• Microsoft Vista comes, new machines get it, nobody on XP upgrades. Microsoft will be content to turn over their installed base with new machines sold and old machines obsoleted. Otherwise, upgrades will be slower than currently forecast.

• Apple delivers Leopard, new machines get it, but upgrades are slower than currently forecast. Tiger is sufficiently good, and external packages (e.g VirtueDesktops) simulate a lot of the new functionality. Apple has a big decision to make, between adding functionality for the IPod/digital home, and functionality for business and enterprise solutions.

• Linux will continue plodding progress in '07, and boom in '08. Linux has a lot to recommend it - including good security, scalability, and cost. Its openness makes it impervious to horrible, enterprise-inappropriate additions, and has a huge leg up on 64-bit solutions. If Ubuntu can continue advancement of a plausible desktop system, Linux will start taking Mac users in '07 and MS users in '08.

• Dynamic languages will keep making inroads on "traditional" (.Net and J2EE) development. Compared to compiled C++, Ruby is one slow language in execution, but there are so many available processing cycles that development savings dominate. It won't run Google or the would-be Googles, but it's fast enough for everybody else. The second wave of RoR apps will appear.

• Ajax is here to stay, and full page refreshes will disappear in 2007. Good packages (such as [Prototype](http://www.prototype.com)), and the ease of integration in new environments (Ruby on Rails) make ajaxification easy for new applications. Existing apps will ajaxify or be replaced by ajax'd apps.

• Google backlash begins. Past a certain size, it gets really hard to not "be evil." Google has passed that size, and the leading edge isn't willing to give them a pass anymore. Look for one new search engine to break on top of the pack.

Wild Swags:

• Oracle buys Sun. Alexander the Great wept, because he had no more worlds to conquer. Larry Ellison does not weep, and Sun Microsystems is the most logical, Oracle-cultural-fit left. The current permissive antitrust environment won't last forever, so Oracle goes Exxon-Mobil(e) in '07.

• Indian IT giants start buying second- and third-tier US software providers. Outsourced development from the US to India is now commonplace; the next logical step is Indian vertical integration into the American market. Wilder swag: Wipro buys Lotus assets from IBM.

• Google buys Ebay. See 7) above. 'Froogle' has gone nowhere, Ebay got spat out of China. Google has innovative IT at scale, Ebay needs innovative IT at scale. Match made in heaven, and these kinds of deals won't find a favorable approval environment forever.

Final Swag:

• Innovators rule. Vista is great looking, but is it a compelling upgrade if DRM restrictions give new users less control than they have now? Apple is also wading into DRM waters that make sense for IPods but not for enterprise-anything. Oracle has its hands full with Fusion, and if you like the JD Edwards, Peoplesoft or Siebel software you're running you might not want to Fuse in '07. As Tony Curtis once said: "In confusion there is profit." '07 looks like a great year for disruptive technologies and solutions.