The Keene View on Web 2.0, Ajax and SaaS

Of the many sins that Silicon Valley practices, none are more dangerous or prevalent than the sin of smugness.

Savio Rodrigues has a good posting entitled Microsoft will prevail in the face of Freetards. His point is that Microsoft is learning from and adapting to the open-source movement, while the open-source movement is so enamored with "free" that they are not paying enough attention to the total cost of ownership from a customer's perspective.

Let's be clear - the free part of open source is a great innovation and worthy of a few minutes of self-satisfaction. The aftermath of the Y2K bubble was the erection of enormous barriers around IT to prevent tem from trying anything new that would cost the company money.

Free provides a "frictionless" entry point for new technology products into the corporation after finance barred the door. Free also enables technology self-service across the corporation, making it possible for anyone with an internet connection and a geek gene to get as wired as they wanna be.

However, free is only worth so much. If it takes me 3 hours to get my "free" open source download working, it cost me however much I or my boss thinks my time is worth x 3 = not free. Similarly, even if an open source product (for example Dojo) is technically superior in every way to Silverlight, that superiority is of no practical value if it is easy to hire experienced Silverlight developers but next to impossible to find, let alone hire, Dojo developers.

Thinking that free is the only aspect of software that matters is freetarded. This is where Microsoft can beat the open source community in general, just as its .NET platform is beating J2EE.

Let me quote from the insanely great Fake Steve Jobs blog:

Red Hat, the single company freetards always point to when they want to prove that open source can make money, has turned inept, with nothing but bluster and bravado and a deluded belief that they're actually a thorn in Microsoft's paw. Bottom line: they're the new Borland. They're 15 years old and have been publicly traded since 1999 and last year they did all of $400 million a year in sales. Microsoft does more than $1 billion a week. That's right. Red Hat's entire fiscal year is a good three days for Microsoft.

Microsoft is onto us. Time for open source software vendors to think beyond free.

Labels: ASP.NET, DOJO, j2ee, open source, Silverlight

With all the excitement around Java alternatives like Rails, a much more important and less commented upon migration has been occurring

For ten years, the ponderous J2EE standard has made the lives of Java programmers everywhere miserable. While various Java standards committees considered gravely what to do next, corporations have been steadily moving to .NET.

In our market research for WaveMaker, we have found that a over 30% of the corporate IT market has moved from Java to .NET. As with many other Microsoft technologies (SQL Server comes to mind), Microsoft has gone from having a laughable solution to getting the last laugh.

We have also found a surprising number of Java developers who tell us that the complexity of J2EE and the difficulty of finding experienced Java developers is forcing them to embrace .NET despite their loathing of all things Microsoft.

Spring and WaveMaker are two companies addressing the core problems underlying this market shift. Spring is the application server that J2EE should have been – lightweight and powerful. WaveMaker is the visual development platform J2EE never had.

Together, Spring and WaveMaker offer a compelling and highly productive alternative to .NET.

How compelling? One of our Fortune 500 customers built the same application (57 web pages, 28 database tables) in both .NET and WaveMaker. The app built with WaveMaker was completed with one third the man-hours and 98% less code (more on this in a later post).

The conclusion is stark - either the Java and open source community needs to put good productivity solutions in the hands of corporate customers, or the data center will go the way of the desktop.

Labels: j2ee, ruby on rails, spring, WaveMaker

David Precopio recently blogged here about Portals, wikis and other transitory technical phenomena. In 2000, portals represented a vision for how a new, user-driven web was going to develop - one which paradoxically required lots of new proprietary software and teams of developers.

Shortly after 2000, application server vendors looking for a way to boost sagging license revenues (what do you mean we can't charge a premium for a commodity J2EE product?!) glommed onto portals as a handy revenue extender/floor wax. They immediately shifted into high gear, selling the whitening and brightening qualities of their "collaborative" web products.

Into the middle of all this crept the real collaborative web products. Using social media as their proving ground, they pioneered user generated content, interactive UIs (remember those nice client/server UIs - they're back as AJAX) and web services (remember those nice objects - they're back as services).

We met a company recently that referred to their 20 person portal project as "our latest boat anchor." Portals are just the latest example that technology vendors often have the right idea about what the future needs but too often try to implement the tools of the future from the worn out components of their past successes.

Labels: AJAX, David Precopio, j2ee, portal, Web 2.0