I'm an happy Apple Mac user since one year now. I have never used a Mac before one year ago, when I decided to make the quantum leap, also because most of my Alfresco colleagues run a Mac and I have been always curious to try it. Before my idea was that Macs were cool but too much of a closed platform, now I think Macs are just the best way to have my work done. I do not want to judge some Apple's very restrictive policies here, everybody has a different opinion (I think the idea of forcing Objective-C on the iPhone is moving millions of Java developers toward Google Android, for example).
I had my MacBook Pro stolen few months ago but I also have an older PC-compatible laptop as a backup: after two days using it I felt the urgency to run to the very first Apple store to buy a new Mac. Back home, I opened the box, switch on it and after a few seconds it was able to recognize there is a NAS with Time-Machine backups: it offered me to restore the last backup and, after few hours, it was like my previous Mac was never stolen, as every piece of software was in its place, even the same desktop wallpaper and icons.
I never have to run anti-virus software, I never have to run any disk defragmentation or registry maintenance. I do not waste time in maintenance of hardware drivers: Apple design both hardware and software to work together, so that the user experience is always the smoothest. I'm also an happy user of Ubuntu Linux, which in my opinion is by far the best desktop Linux distribution. Ubuntu also runs daily in my Mac through a VirtualBox image, when I have to run some Linux software for my work. Despite the fact Ubuntu software is (almost) as easy as a Mac to install, configure and run, the fact is that Canonical - the company behind Ubuntu - is a software firm only, so they have to run their beautiful O.S. on a multitude of different hardware devices and software device drivers. This is the same problem Windows has. Each computer comes with different internal devices (motherboard, CPU, hard disk, network cards, Wifi cards, graphic card, ....), so there always a combination of hardware devices and software drivers which could cause a compatibility issue. It is always a race for Canonical, Microsoft and the others to prove their software on a plethora of hardware and sometimes broken drivers. So, when we put the blame on Microsoft in cases when Windows can be occasionally unstable, actually we should blame the real source, which usually is some sub-component of our PC and quite always a buggy software driver, which is out of control of Microsoft and others.
Of course, the above was especially true in the early days of personal computing, when enthusiasts like me were used to assemble their PC by hand. Now, if you buy especially a laptop from, say, Dell, HP, IBM, etc... you can be pretty sure all components are pre-tested, so everything will (almost) work just fine. However, nobody designs and produces beautiful hardware and client software like Apple does so, despite all competitors' efforts, my position is that the overall Apple user experience is still by far superior, exactly because every single component, together with communication, is designed with integration and user's experience in mind. It is interaction design at its best.
This positive and viable integration, by contrast, is very hard to be experienced when moving from consumer computing to Enterprise systems nowadays. Let's be honest: distributed enterprise systems are a total mess of hardware and software combinations. The level of incompatibility that we could have in a single consumer devices is multiplied by a magnitude factor. The major problems with Enterprise systems implemented, for example, in JEE or .NET, are due to inter-application and external systems integration issues. The applicative layer usually runs into different application servers, which runs over different operating systems and usually must connect to different relational databases, external information systems (ERP, CRM, ECM, etc....) and messaging systems. There is an explosive combinatorial matrix of configurations in need for testing and QA. At the end each customer needs to run on the existing infrastructure with few variations, so most of the time spent maintaining enterprise applications is actually spent trying to force a software into a specific and unique infrastructure: pitfalls are everywhere. Support centers spend most of their time just running after specific software + hardware configuration issues. No wonder if today some crucial business processes are still running into very old but well HW + SW integrated mainframes.
The positive Apple's integration model should work also for enterprise-class solutions. In my mind Sun Microsystems was one of the companies going closer to applying the Apple's consumer integrated design model to the enterprise world. Sun designed both hardware and software (Solaris O.S., Java, etc were tuned to specific Sun's servers and components). Buying a Sun server was usually a positive integrated experience, running Oracle on Sun servers was a rock-solid decision. The main problem, in my humble opinion, is that Sun was not ready or not willing to go the extra mile: moving the software stack up to applicative layer and moving their business out of the commoditized server business. I mean, Sun's management perceived they had to, as the late open-source initiatives testifies, but the company has never been structured to make this vital step forward executing the process in the right way (McNealy almost acknowledges this), so most of the ideas remained on paper or stuck without execution until Oracle's acquisition was the only way to save the company.
I think strong infrastructural integration is now not enough for a vendor to exit from commoditization trends and for a customer to solve integration's madeness. Some Cloud Computing initiatives are a clear step in the direction of moving the stack up from Infrastructure as a Service to actual Software as a Service. At the end, moving in the cloud the infrastructure only is not going to solve most of the applicative-level problems of moder enterprise solutions: if, for example, I run my software into Amazon EC2, I can solve many infrastructural provisioning problems in a row, but at the applicative layer my J2EE solution is still running into different O.S and application servers which need to be integrated and tested for compatibility and performances.
I guess, even if existing platforms are maybe too young and still immature to move all solutions there, the right direction for better isolating applications and application development from infrastructural problems will be to provide a complete, uniform applicative platform where most reliability and scalability problems are solved by model's definition. I think initiatives like the Google App Engine, VMWare's Cloud Application Framework, Salesforce Platfom are good examples of what could bring Apple's consumer-side positive experience into the enterprise applications ecosystem soon. Companies should eventually show some perspective, intelligence and courage and start experimenting as soon as possible.
Update (20 Jan 2011): Amazon has just announced the new AWS Elastic Beanstalk, which I think should be included in the above list of advanced PaaS solution. It looks much like GAP and at first sight Amazon's new platform shows an interesting degree of flexibility for developers. First released version is for Java.
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