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."

Comments

plus 4, T8ol5l)

[Anonymous Coward]

And 3xciting;

...and good riddance.

[CFD339]

IBM bought into analyst predictions in the 90's and went whole hog after the J2EE server marketing, believing that they could own the lion's share of this supposedly huge market.

That market never emerged. J2EE is a standard. Websphere is expensive and massively cumbersome. If you wish to compete against open source with a product based on a standard, you must differentiate on either price or function. You can't compete on price with FREE, so you must compete on features. Do that, and now you're not "standard" any more.

The lack of sales of Websphere lead to "Portal Server" (pre-built j2ee apps to then sell Websphere). It didn't sell. That lead to "workplace". That died a death. You won't even here the "Workplace" being used by IBM sales now.

To bury the failure, IBM accounting peopled decided that "Websphere" was about "messaging" (not email, but application messaging) and moved MQSERIES into the Websphere budget. Thus, you could sell zero websphere servers and never even notice the missing budget within the massive MQ budget.

In my experience, Websphere and all it's derivitive products (portal, workplace, and some really terrible attempts at other tools) have been bloated, unmanageable, and incredibly expensive.

Should be a great fit at Microsoft.