Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
So based upon a Slashdot summary, your informed opinion is that IBM is better off without the architect of one of the most successful app server platforms ever? Do you even know what WebSphere is?
Source
No, he spent the day working on his chair throwing and Google killing techniques.
Navicula hydraulica plena anguilarum est. Omnes castelli tuus nostri sunt. Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.
If he takes his nebulous EJB spec with him, I'm all for it. Sun really should have cleaned that thing up before releasing it to the world. It's great in theory, but in practice almost no one implements the damn standard correctly! (Or at least, in a useful fashion.)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
...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!
Do you even know what WebSphere is?
An orb of internets??
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I do. I use it every day. All 2gb of ram and 3ghz+ it requires to run painfully- which is better than the alternative of not running at all. (Yes, I do realize the difference between the IDE WSAD and the server WAS).
Oh yes, Websphere. How could we survive without Websphere? Are there any other Java application servers out there? Oh God, where could they be? To give it some credit, Websphere isn't really bad when compared to the competition. It's just outrageously expensive compared to them for what you get. The IDE is outdated out the door compared to Eclipse. The server is HIDEOUSLY expensive compared to JBoss or, what most companies really need, Tomcat. You can easily employ a whole department for the license costs of a proper cluster. Neverminding the fact that you need just as many people whether you use Websphere or whatever.
Companies are abandoning Websphere left and right because Websphere 6.0 is a giant egg that costs far too much when compared to every other alternative. I'd say the man left because he realized if he stayed he'd be lucky to work 90 hour weeks for the next two years overhauling the platform just to keep his current salary.
Websphere's not so bad. It's just not worth the money. Not anymore at least.
Tip: If you think you need Websphere for your particular application give me $100,000 plus your salary and I'll show you how you can do it without.
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+
Eh, WAS is the VB of app server platforms - every idiot who took a Java class can call themselves a "WAS developer" and deliver shitty code, full of leaks, stupid non-optimizations, and bloat.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
No. It's been proven that spheres are the best shapes for travelling down tubes, so IBM packaged their data into little balls, in order to travel down the internet tubes as fast as possible.
So based upon a Slashdot summary, your informed opinion is that IBM is better off without the architect of one of the most successful app server platforms ever?
Was he the architect of websphere? Also I'm not sure what "architecture" there is in websphere anyway. Its like saying Office is "architect"
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.
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.
which is exactly why he went to microsoft... ;)
. o O ( TwO hEaDs ArE mOrE tHaN oNe... )
Orb of Internets:
Binds when picked up
Mainhand
-15 Stamina
+7 Intelligence
-12 Strength
-2 Spirit
Equip: Decreases actual work done by up to 20.
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."
What? WebSphere was never "a patched version of Tomcat." And to say the early versions had "no support for EJBs" is a little disingenuous, considering that the spec didn't exist yet -- not to mention that it was IBM that invented EJBs, not Sun.
Breakfast served all day!
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.
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... :-(
Do you know what WebSphere is? Today, it's actually little more than another IBM brand, a marketing device. You have WebSphere, Rational, Tivoli, and perhaps a few more. All products seem to be labeled that way. MQ is WebSphere. WebSphere is almost anything. Having worked with the stuff (in particular MQ, WAS, WPS) for some years now, I have become rather weary of it. But then, Sturgeon's law applies: 90% of everything is crap. And the remaining 10% may just be crap too.
In my opinion, moving a designer of bloatware to MS is a good thing for everyone but MS. It won't do IBM much good, IBM is certainly capable of foot-shooting without him.
-
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
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
What being served from the web could NOT be called "web services"?
Those things that aren't SOAP- or XMLRPC-encoded, for a start.
Aren't you talking about WSAD? WebSphere Application Developer (WSAD, now known as Rational Application Developer, or RAD) is one thing. WebSphere Application Server (WAS) is another thing. A "WAS developer" doesn't exists. A "WSAD developer" may exist, and, as most VB'ers out there, will deliver bad code :-)
ilex paraguariensis for all
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
mix some notes with websphere and MS will truly have a pile on their hands.
Defintely! Websphere's an ok appserver. It'll run fine, but the clustering is subpar, BEA's Weblogic has a much better performing clustering solution. So does Resin, which sells the commercial enterprise version for something like a $500 license. Actually, I've only cursorily examined Resin, but it appears from the documentation to follow the designated in-memory replication approach used by the best BEA solution, which has 5 different approaches to clustering, only 2 of which scale well, and only the in-memory one that scales transparently.
As long as you don't use proprietary components, you shouldn't care what appserver you run on. Write to the spec, develop on whatever you want, then deploy and test to Websphere. It's a much better and faster running solution, and keeps you honest.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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
Dude, you really don't have a clue do you ? Let's break this down a bit.....WebSphere is an "application server". This, in it's simplest form, is a "server" that lets you run "applications". In a broad sense PHP, Perl, Ruby, etc could all be considered application servers (apples, oranges, etc....but all fruit). Like many other similar platforms, WebSphere uses a repackaged version of Apache HTTP server to server HTTP requests. This represents about 0.01% of what companies buy WebSphere for.
The key functionality of WebSphere is to allow developers to build large web-accessible applications in Java. This does not mean applets. In fact, WebSphere has nothing to do with applets. It's about using Java on the server side to deliver web apps. WebSphere follows (or trails, depending on your point of view) the Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) spec from Sun. As such, it performs the same function as BEA WebLogic, RedHat JBoss, Apache Jeronimo, Sun Glassfish, etc. This does include a servlet container, similar to Apache Tomcat, but also includes the infamous "EJB container" which has capabilities beyond that of the servlet container along with hard to understand API's and that have launched a million blog entries by bitter Java programmers.
So, if there's so many Java app servers then why does anyone pay so much money for WebSphere ? Well, IBM has a crap-load of products that build on WebSphere to integrate to all manner of 'legacy systems'. If you're a big company that has millions if not billions of dollars tied up in such 'legacy systems' then this is a really good thing. The fact that said legacy systems probably came from IBM in the first place makes the CIO feel better about buying WebSphere.....plus companies like this are risk-averse and want that corporate support that IBM is (arguably) known for when they inevitably screw things up.
Anyways, I hope that provides a tiny insight into what the heck people are talking about here. WebSphere is much more than a 'web server', comparing it to Apache will not impress the CIO you bump into in the elevator, and it has absolutely nothing to do with applets.
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.
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
I do. Worked on system test for it in one of IBMs RTP, NC sweatshop labs. It is an overly bloated POS that tries to hack together everything in the enterprise for managing PCs into a Web frontend. It's a disjointed, discontiguous hack of lots of various technologies thrown in a bucket and stirred liberally.
Websphere was not "architected". That implies forethought and planning, not "hack together lots of other people's technologies and call it a management platform."
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
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
It is not great even i theory. It is not even object oriented - pure abomination