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Father of WebSphere Leaves IBM For Microsoft
jg21 writes ".NET Developer's Journal is reporting that Don Ferguson, the 'Father of WebSphere,' has left IBM to join Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie's office. Ozzie, whose efforts to rebuild Microsoft have been discussed previously on Slashdot, is gaining a man who while at Blue championed Web services, patterns, Web 2.0, and business-driven development — a potent combo for the future that Microsoft is trying to bring into being."
...the future that Microsoft is trying to bring into being.
*shivers*
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Folks at near-VP level get $1M a year in just stock grants. That's not your daddy's options, real stock is given to these folks. Sure it vests over 5 year period, but you get a ton of it every year. I think he'll be one of those rest-and-vest types. Which is perfectly fine by Microsoft if that's the price to pay to decapitate a competitor. There are exceptions to this rule, though, most notably Anders Hejlsberg. But back when he joined there weren't any $1M a year stock payouts, and to be fair, he's worth it.
I for one am happy to see the smart people spread around evenly, not just going to google. Competition between smart people encourages innovation, and like it or not, given their market share, having a few smart people sucked into M$ from time to time will reduce global suffering due to technology. Wonder how it feels to have quitting your job will end up on slashdot!?! I don't know how many people *at my last job* noticed when I quit.
-- http://thegirlorthecar.com funny dating game for guys
... Web services, patterns, Web 2.0, and business-driven development ...
That's an impressive collection of nebulous terminology in a single sentence. What being served from the web could NOT be called "web services"? How can you do anything in programming without identifying "patterns". After watching Yahoo! screw their site up I would think "Web 2.0" would be a dirty word by now. And "business-driven development" is a PHB sales pitch if I ever heard one. I think IBM is better off without him.
Only in a slashdotter's wet dream...
I for one am not surprised by this action. I have heard for a while that morale at IBM is at an all time low and this is the result. I wonder how much other good talent has left IBM that we do not know about.
Did Ballmer spend the day mending a broken chair.
Unless Microsoft has something that Big Blue doesn't besides better offices then I'd probably rather stay with IBM.
Source
"I have heard for a while that morale at IBM is at an all time low and this is the result. "
Put them to work on open source. That'll cheer them right up.
...championed Web services, patterns, Web 2.0, and business-driven development -- a potent combo for the future that Microsoft is trying to bring into being.
Don't forget the tubes!
well i hate the web and all it's attempts at becoming and application platform. i've lost count of the number of shit house "web apps" that have made my life difficult. they can't ALL be programmers without a clue. the web was designed as a means of displaying information quickly and easily to lots of people. stick to it.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Websphere has come a long way but its still crap. When performance testing various apps against Websphere and then Weblogic and OpenSource alternatives like Jboss, Sun's Glassfish, Apache's Geronimo and Object Web's Jonas, the only thing Websphere has going for it is its dumbed down interface for administration. When it comes to performance, every one of the previously mentioned application servers beat it hands down.
I've seen Websphere as its progressed from nothing more than an patched version of Tomcat with no support for EJB's all the way to 6.1 where it implements all kinds of support for web services and SOA implementations. The problem with Websphere is, as intuitive as they may make the configuration interface, there's thousands of little bugs nesting up in each release that affect all sorts of frameworks and pieces of code. IBM's support is SO HORRIBLE that most development teams just end up coding around bugs in Websphere when they can.
I'm saying all of this because, much like any Microsoft product, Websphere never held the lead with innovation or performance, it was always just strongly marketed by IBM's Global Services division.
Microsoft can have the guy.. he'll probably fit in well.
a man who while at Blue championed Web services, patterns, Web 2.0, and business-driven development
So this guy comes up with all those damn buzzwords?
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
I've done a fair amount of work with WebSphere. Just because it's prevalent in terms of its usage, it does not mean that it's a good solution for the problems at hand.
Like many enterprise-grade tools today, it's extremely over-designed. The buffet of buzzwords in the summary is complete correct, and shows the mindset behind the WebSphere Application Server. The only reason it is so popular is because IBM has powerful marketing and sales forces. They'll convince your CIO, CTO and other managers that you just have to use their products, hardware, and of course their support services.
It's not surprising that they push such over-designed solutions. The larger the system, the more powerful hardware it needs to run on ($$$ in IBM's pocket), and of course the easier it breaks (again, $$$ in IBM's pocket). A lot of the WebSphere systems I've worked with could have been reimplemented in Python instead of Java, run on several decent Linux servers, while using PostgreSQL as the database backend. Independent Python consultants could easily provide sufficient support, often quicker and far cheaper than what you'd get from IBM. And competent Python professionals are quite plentiful in any fair-sized city.
Ever since they hired on that guy from Walmart to run retail strategy its been getting worse at least at retail. My retailers are having a lower opinion of Microsoft lately and the Microsoft Rep looks overworked and unhappy. I'm beginning to question as a stockholder about the direction of thier retail strategy which seeds the entire industy. Why they hired someone from Walmart I dunno... They definatly should have hired someone from Target.. At least they take care of thier workers and suppliers and practice doing it daily. Probably why Target is expanding in sales at 7 percent a year.
Are they really going to use him, or just deny him from being used by IBM?
If they are going to use him, I wonder what his non-compete contract will restrict him from, if anything.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Please translate from Marketing to English.
Thanks
Being the father of websphere, I would imagine this guy to have his run of it and full of corporate burnout. He's looking for a job with less responsibilities to where he can be in a room and give a bunch of ideas and tell others to execute. Collect his cash and go home. He's going to work 9am - 4pm four days a week max and be sitting pretty.
Liken it unto Emit Smith taking a possition at the Cardnials to finish his carrer. It's easy money, it's a day job, like taking candy from a baby.
I worked as a co-op at IBM Endicott in 1984 (1/2 day at high school, 1/2 day at IBM) and in my department was a man who was nearing retirement in a few years. During the nine months I worked there, I saw this man do *nothing* but read the newspaper - every day. None of the managers gave him a thing to do, even though he was drawing a salary and gold-plated benefits (in those days) IBM was known for.
Several years later, in the early 1990's when IBM (the company who had never had a layoff) started it's slash-and-burn and "Four Check" witchhunt to trim staff, I often wondered if this guy had retired yet.
Sad note: IBM started in Endicott, NY -- now it no longer exists there. The last business unit was divested several years ago.
It seems they have some sort of pricing voodoo going on. Example:
Anyway it's a webserver and some applets. Here's a direct link to the list of stuff that's been stuffed into the Websphere brand envelope: SW By category
If they're running their website on it I feel sorry for their customers trying to do ecommerce -- getting a price is impossible, you can't proceed from the product page to the purchase, it keeps asking where I'm from, etc. etc.
But my heart really goes out to the poor soul that's got to translate that gibberish into meaningful chinese. I love IBM, but American Geek is my mother tongue and I can't make out what they're saying here.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
don't know where u got your facts but a lot of it is wrong. workplace is under the lotus brand and hasn't died a slow death and is . websphere portal has nothing to do with WAS (now RAS under rational) or WSAD(RAD). It is under the Lotus brand but the "websphere" was never dropped. websphere portal competes with sharepoint, vignette, bea weblogic portal and so forth. workplace encompasses forms, wcm and a few others. next time don't blab about stuff u dont know. stick to notes and domino apps ~ a la your website. see you in orlando this weekend if you're gonna be there this year :)
He or she is right on.... quarter by quarter is how IBM is managed... it's annoying to say the least
you bring up a good point. IBM, flying high on their dominance in the console wars. But hard times may be ahead.
So, they had the guy responsible for Lotus Notes, and now they get the guy behind websphere. What next? The guy behind Tivoli?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Tomcat ;-)
"championed Web services, patterns, Web 2.0, and business-driven development"
he advocated using web pages?? call the patent office.
Where the hell do you come up with that dribble? Almost every enterprise IT environment I know of has adopted J2EE and WebSphere technologies as standard for all business platforms...
It is funny how people assume that Google employees are smart. I suppose it has to do with the type of (supposely hard) interviews they perform. Let me tell you, I did an internship in Google, and the people was like in any other place. There were smart people and there were incompetent people. In fact, one of the things that surprised me at Google was that people was just average, once you have taken off the layer of arrogance and condescendence. As you may know, Google is not interested in making technical questions. They also disregard all your previous experience. They are only interested in making algorithm and puzzle questions. Most of those who pass those interviews (like I did) just trained for it hard enough (and had a few months to spare waiting in between interviews). Even if your brain fits very well those type of questions and you can answer them without studying, it does not mean you are going to perform well at your job.
I could not agree more. Servers running on java is an absolutely retarded idea. (Unless you're trying to sell hardware, wink, wink, nudge, nudge...)
And the latest Java 5 Enterprise Enterprise standard won't be available under WebSphere Application Server until sometime in 2008. Who knows JEE6 may have been ratified by then. There is WebSphere Application Server Community Edition which is JEE 5 compliant, but that is based off the Apache Geronimo code base and so is in my opinion completely different to the core WebSphere product.
Huh what you are talking about, J2EE is defacto standard in enterprises, banks, insurance companies. IBM is making big money with this stuff. While websphere is hated very often, it is used quite widely. It is a beast to develop for but very robust in production use (hence people often use smaller app servers for development and WAS for deployment) As for bloated and expensive I agree... :-(
> If you wish to compete against open source
> with a product based on a standard,
> you must differentiate on either price or function.
No thats not true. IBM make the money on the support services they sell to the customer. The software just helps those sales.
When you have tens of millions of dollars invested in just Java/WebSphere technology, I don't think a version change will make much of a difference a year from now. Not to mention, we're running servers until EOL; for example we *just* upgraded our portal software from 4.5 to 6WS. Java going to 6? No one will even notice, though it'll be in the back of our minds until 2010 (or even later!).
The guy behind Rational, MS needs him too!
That way MS will have the maximum amount of suckage that have ever existed in one place.
I propose that this will form a singularity of suck, a black hole of sorts, which in short order will concentrate all the suck on the planet and keep it locked at the MS campus for all time.
Enjoy the sucking, because it will end soon!
-- To dream a dream is grand, but to live it is divine. -- Leto ][
At least when you decide to respond to the comment.
heh, that's my sentiment too.
I worked with WebSphere 2.x and 3.x in the relatively early days of EJB ( 1999 - 2001 ) and it was a total mess.
2.x didn't even work with EJBs, though it was sold as a server having EJB support. We even had a couple of Global Services guys come in to "show us how it's done". Bottom line was that the thing would crash if there ever was more than 1 concurrent request to any entity bean. After a couple of weeks the guys left and told us to wait for 3.0. Lovely.
3.x worked ok once (if?) you got it installed (and until it corrupted itself). This was no mean feat since, instead of using configuration files it would install a whole instance of DB2 as a config repository. I'm not talking about the db your application would be using, oh no... it needed a schema for its own config. Oh, and how would you manage this thing ? You would use the admin server of course. This was a pre-configured instance of the server with an admin web-app that would basically muck with the data in the aforementioned configuration database. This all was a cute idea except for the fact that it took hundreds of megs of RAM at a time when development machines and even servers didn't have all that much. Then of course, if anything went wrong, which it often did, especially during divelopment, you were basically SOL. Not only was the logging bad, but also there was just nothing you could really do if things went wrong because of the damn configuration database which was a black box. So you could try to delete a server instance and create a new one and
then redefine your app hoping that would fix things.
What if the config server didn't start or was acting wonky? oh, uninstall everything and try again. (If you were running on windows, usually this meant actually reinstalling windows because WS and DB2 would leave all sorts of stuff in the registry and sometimes in system32 that would confuse the installer or just make it seem to succeed while leaving you with a broken install.)
I briefly used 4.x and 5.x later and they seemed better but were still a big pain to install and deal with compared to other options.
I'm the first to admit that EJBs are of questionable choice given their overhead but if you're going to use them, I don't understand why ANYONE would use WS when you could get WebLogic instead. Of late, of course Jboss is a pretty good choice and, as mentioned, it's free.
(Besides, if you're doing anything new now, EJB3 is the way to go anyway and i don't think anyone other than Jboss even has support for that. )
Enough reminiscing from me, but man am i glad i don't have to deal with WS anymore (at least for now).
Well we all have escalating targets every year, but guess which division always makes or exceeds their target ? Yes ! Its Corporate HQ ! Now if they just told the rest of us how to do as well as they can, the company would go right up.
There appears to be quite a disconnect between vision, sales and development at IBM.
:-).
Louis Gerstner performed more or less a miracle by getting these (technically extremely competent) people to actually work a bit together (in a fairly brutal way, read Who says elephants can't dance) but either the visionaries are getting too old at IBM (because new talent cannot reach the top without going native) or there's not enough stewardship from the top to contain the internal strife that holds the company back.
IBM has never had a problem doing good things technically, but I personally feel they wasted a Godawful time on Lotus. The user interface still sucks big time, and it's only saving grace was that it was so awkward it stopped virus infections dead in their tracks (OK, and inter-user crypto is better than MS Exchange because it actually exists
If they had the guts to go Open Source all the way (for example, pick an Open Source replacement for Lotus and put resources behind it) they may do something good. At present it looks like everyone is just using corporate inertia to last a couple more years before it falls apart for good (classic example: looking at turnover instead of turnover trending).
The seniority of a board always plays a big role. I remember fighting an uphill battle in another biggie for a project that, at the time, was revolutionary and I was held back every step of the way by oldies who didn't want to rock the boat running a risk only a few years from their pension (it was, of course, called "not exposing the company to risk", forgetting the adage that "ships are safe in the harbour - but that's not what ships are for"). I only won this battle, btw, because I found one senior person heading for retirement in that club who didn't mind going out with a bang and we thus ended up building something that is still working almost 15 years later - and I left after that because I got sick and tired of having to explain the obvious time and time again.
That company needs help, but their Board will have to see that first. Not sure if they have another visionary around - doesn't look like it. If they can't shake off that corporate dullness at the top they'll die like that too. All IMHO, though, but the signs are all there.
Insert
IIRC that political movement hired away many of Borland's top developers attempt to eliminate Borland's C/C++ as a competitor. Prior to that, Borland was at the top of proprietary C/C++ compilers.
So how much of the motivation behind this recent hire is just an attempt to hurt IBM ? Clearly the overall development of the IT sector would be better if he had stayed.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
...so let me ask it out loud: What kind of person does one have to be to leave IBM and join Microsoft?
I've read a few snide remarks in the last 20 seconds allready, so I guess I'm not the only one notably unimpressed. Yet I have to ask: What is Websphere all about? What's the big, fat, hairy deal? It appears to me as some giant bloated hunk of web related software that appears to have just as much use as others of it's kind (BEA, Sun [Whatever Server] and so forth) with huge incomprehensible backend that have no practical use and application in getting the job done.
Tell me, is it just some piece of 'ware to give business users a reason to buy more servers or does it have a real use? What can Webspere or any other large commercial "Appplication Server" do that any halfway mature OSS web system like Zope, Tomcat, Drupal, Joomla Framework or Rails can't? (And, yes, I know they are classified as different types of software, but all in all they do the more or less the same thing)
Someone with knowledge about Websphere (or some simular product) please enlighten me.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Whilst I wouldn't entirely disagree with your sentiments about WebSphere (and I use it every day) it is the case that it has been a very successful product line for IBM. It is the biggest product in the space with around 37% of market share (though this isn't an exclusive deal - in a lot of companies I visit they are using two or more JEE servers). And the consulting and services on top of this make for one very profitable line. But it is kind of struggling at the moment - miles off the pace in terms of keeping up with the standard (no news that I've seen yet on when they'll be doing JEE 5 support, for example, which IMHO is the most important thing to happen in the JEE space in years). So hopefully someone else in IBM will get involved in the product and maybe push it forward.
Holy crap, I always thought that Websphere was another one of Dr. Frankensteins little ones....
The Bigger The Headache The Bigger the Pill
I have been with the WebSphere Portal Support team since 2003, and the entire time our sales have done nothing but go up, as workplace runs on top of that as well as several other apps that ibm sells, it continues to grow. A large number of companies are using Portal it is doing anything but not selling. V6 just came out and actually has a nice interface. the one thing about portal is that it is not something you install and suddenly it does everything for you, it is just a framework to bring all your content together in one place(ui) so that your users are not clicking all over the place trying to find this or that app. and now with the JSR 168 standard it is only getting better as your portlets are more mobile from system to system, and will only inspire other systems to write portlets for things like oracle and seibel and the like there by enhancing portal's value. it is not a do all for anybody but it can create a great ui experience for your customers.
An armed society is a polite Society
Whomever they can't replace in India, China and Brazil they cut loose onto bullshit projects that go nowhere because of 99 layers of management and a 'save our way to prosperity' mentality. Senior people at IBM are treated like Gods, comparatively speaking. The minions are denied training, travel, education, pay raises, bonuses while benefits get worse every year. First and second line managers are turned over like flapjacks so that the people who actually do the work have 2, 3, 4 managers a year and then if they're lucky they won't stumble into a department that's being 'reorganized' out of existence forcing them to find another job or quit. Meanwhile, the aristocrats lavish literally hundreds of millions of dollars on themselves while they send out epistles that a) extol the workers greatness and b) warn them to work harder for less for the sake of the firm.
I can only imagine that if a senior guy leaves IBM for greener pastures they must have already decided, for no obvious reason at all to either kill all that person's products and projects, or, some palace infighting has left them holding their own ass.
I sold all my IBM and MS stock last week because it finally went up and it was clearly time to bail before they fuck it up again. And this observer's opinion is that IBM may be broken up and spun off in the near future and MS may split into several different companies as well. Because neither of them can get out of their own way.
Let me tell you two things:
:-)
1) Big companies needs big support. Who will guarantee their servers will be up'n'running 24x7? Who will pay the fines if a failure stops the big company from operating for, say, 3 hours? That's the IBM's market. IBM is big enough (and have people enough) to support this kind of company.
2) In my experience as a Java developer, I can say WebSphere is one of the fastest application servers in the market. Even faster when running in real servers (not that cheap toys). JBoss (opensource) is really good, but isn't enough for some companies. The difference between JBoss and WebSphere is that JBoss is made for developers (it's easy to install/configure) and WebSphere is made for performance. It's not a trivial task to install/configure, but once configured, it is fast as hell
ilex paraguariensis for all
Um, I didn't say they weren't really cool applets? Why would I call it a servlet container? It's a fork of apache. To humans, that means it's a webserver.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
mix some notes with websphere and MS will truly have a pile on their hands.
Donald Ferguson was the chief architect for IBM's software group and had been at IBM for more than 20 years. During which time he architected and helped establish the WebSphere Application Server's current number one market position. Equally important, Ferguson managed the integration between WebSphere and IBM's other middleware products, DB2, Tivoli, Rational and Lotus, as chairman of the company's SWG Architecture Board.
Web services, patterns, Web 2.0, and business-driven development. . . .
a potent combo for the present that Microsoft has resisted tooth and nail.
illegitimii non ingravare
Thank you. I was a trolling, sort of. This is the explanation I was trying to elicit -- what the thing really is, because frankly the original poster and I have no idea, and the website is not forthcoming.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I am forever baffled by people who are impressed by a fridge full of soda.
Consider how much the office costs in rent. Consider your own wages. Now consider that the typical cost of a can of pop or two per person is utterly and completely an insignificant cost in comparison.
Consider further that having pop in-house means people are less likely to go off for twenty minutes to get a drink.
It seems to me that you'd have to be an unimaginative fool of a beancounter (is there another kind?) to not want to have a fridge full of pop in the office.
Microsoft hires smart people. In fact, people with a bit of prestige or flamboyance get sucked in regularily (remember Blake Stone.) The good news is; after the Offer you Cannot refuse, those people fade away into total obscurity. But Microsoft KNOWS that some people have followers, so when Microsoft seconds someone, often they count on getting all those minions. And... only those people are in the Microsoft fold, the blinders are on and the stagnation begins. The festering pot of has-been good ideas not invented at Redmond that calls itself the Microsoft campus.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
Isn't this like the Microsoft search wizard that went to Google China? Didn't Google have to agree not to have him work on search technology?
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
LOL. Workplace is gone. Even the brand name is now markedly absent. See you next week in Orlando.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
J2EE is a defacto standard for transactions via the net (not the standard, but a standard).
Websphere, however, is just one very expensive and cumbersome way of serving that standard. It's massive, complex, and expensive. The market isn't even a 10th of what it was predicted to be 10 years ago because MOST of what happens on the net ISN'T transactional. Building a website based entirely on J2EE is like building a sand castle one grain of sand at a time. It can be done, and really great things can be built -- but WHY?
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
...the use of the word "Workplace" at lotusphere next week by IBM. Portal, sure, will continue to sell (has to go up in sales, it started at 0 not long ago) but total customer penetration (not percent of the tiny market for servers overall, but the actual number of deployed sites who are not ibm partners and beta sites or otherwise sponsored and discounted or funded by the ibm efforts is very very small.
Every customer I ever showed portal to say "Hey, cool, look how it integrates everything together! How much? Really? And the hardware costs what? Um, I think we'll use a web page with some links."
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
You may mark this flamebait, but most of the people who responded agree with some or all of what I said. Who's the coward? I'm just a bit critical of Emperor Mills' choice in clothing.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln