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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
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
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
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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 ][
...so let me ask it out loud: What kind of person does one have to be to leave IBM and join Microsoft?
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.
Well.. ..I am not going to shill for IBM, because really, I've worked with the hairy mess that is WebSphere, and it's like everything from IBM - a lifestyle choice. You don't just recommend it like you would Zope or FoR.
But in the end you buy software in this class for a few key reasons:
1. Ability to interface directly with many platforms. (see #2)
2. The ability to write software that runs on many platforms. And I don't mean Linux or Windows when I say platforms, I mean like mainframe, mini, datacenter, server, etc.
3. The ability to write really big systems.
When I mean really big, I am saying, you know like supporting an e-commerce website with 80,000 http request per second. They are rare, but they are out there. Although the core of the product is IBM HTTP Server, which is a fork of Apache, the key is in the tuning.
Here is the test I recommend when people ask me about it: can you run a query against your live database to determine orders/transactions placed today?
If you can, than don't worry about Websphere or middleware at all. You are fine. Your site or app is still "small" (not a perjorative).
If you can't, than it means you probably have a big system. And maybe you need middleware.
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.