Vendor Wars
By Alex Bunardzic under Talk on 29. August 2005It is becoming increasingly difficult for me to envision why would anyone not consider lesscode much more desirable than morecode? Software code is like the headcount: you typically only hire as many people as you need in order to successfully run your business. Anyone that might suggest to you that it is much better to double or triple your payroll, ‘just in case’, is simply hosing you.
But I am getting mighty mystified by the fact that so many developers tend to lean towards and support the morecode way of doing software development. Why would anyone in their right mind embrace enthusiastically the proliferation of code? I see that developers are now cheering about the introduction of annotations (yet another extra conceptual space where code proliferation is bound to occur). Why would people celebrate something that is only going to make their lives more complicated?
Then it dawned on me – we’re in the midst of vendor wars. It is a trivial observation, but software vendors are manipulating the situation in the attempts to - dare I say it? - rule the world!
From a typical software vendor perspective, morecode is not necessarily a bad situation. Pushing a platform/vision on unsuspecting population of developers, whereby forcing them to engage in the practice of morecode is not something over which software vendors are necessarily losing their sleep. At the end of the day, it will be us, developers in the trenches, who will have to wrestle with the morecode migraines.
I’ve always found it curious how easy it is to recruit foot soldiers for a particular vendor. There never seems to be shortage of Microsoft or Java or Oracle etc. apologists, who are canvassing the tradeshows, propagating the vendor of their choice. They appear as if they’re working for their sweetheart vendor, but what’s fascinating is that all these Herculean efforts are voluntary. No one pays them to do all the free marketing and advertising for Microsoft, Java, Oracle, IBM…
Why would someone sacrifice so much of their lives to serve some giant vendor? I must honestly say I really don’t understand the motivation behind that. However, it neatly explains why so many developers are happily embracing the morecode gospel.
Rafe:
If I write a Java application that uses Tomcat, Spring, Hibernate, and MySQL, then deploy it on Debian Linux, which vendor gets served? Who has tricked me into doing it?
comment at 29. August 2005
Robert Brewer:
morecode == morework == morejobsecurity, perhaps?
comment at 29. August 2005
alexbunardzic:
Rafe asks:
“If I write a Java application that uses Tomcat, Spring, Hibernate, and MySQL, then deploy it on Debian Linux, which vendor gets served? Who has tricked me into doing it?”
Could we say the same for Struts? It used to be vendor-neutral at one point, no?
comment at 29. August 2005
alexbunardzic:
Robert Brewer:
morecode == morework == morejobsecurity, perhaps?
And don’t forget the two additional variations, that seem to be all the rage nowadays:
morecode == moreworkforindian_developers == lessjobsecurity
and
morecode == moreworkforcodegeneratingframeworks == lessjobsecurity
comment at 29. August 2005
Rafe:
Is Struts not vendor-neutral? It wasn’t tied to any particular vendor when I was using it.
comment at 30. August 2005
alexbunardzic:
Struts is now a de facto MVC framework for many Java EE projects. It has been embraced by EBM (Everybody But Microsoft).
comment at 30. August 2005
Alex Schroeder:
Based on my experience I think the people evangelizing for Oracle and Microsoft and all the other vendors are people from a company that invests money in being an Oracle Partner or having many Microsoft Certified Engineers. They believe that their close association with one of the big players is giving them a competitive advantage in their respective niches. Your app uses Oracle, you sell it as a plus to your customers, you have the Oracle logos in your reception hall, and you send two geeks a year to some tradeshow, invite your customers to go there as well, and maybe you’ll even give talks — about using Oracle in your projects.
comment at 30. August 2005
John:
Developers embrace “morecode” because the people (managers) who judge them see higher productivity (LOC) and are mostly not competent coders so they really believe this is better. Developers who deliver on this basis rise faster in the ranks and get to be managers (who judge their juniors on LOC).
comment at 01. September 2005
alexbunardzic:
John wrote:
“Developers embrace “morecode” because the people (managers) who judge them see higher productivity (LOC)”
Simple as that. You know, you may have hit the nail on the head (btw, I really like your blog:-)
comment at 01. September 2005
hxa:
Complexity will always have some attraction for the geek mind. And fear of being left with outdated ’skills’ by not keeping up with the next big tech, almost always influences developers. I have certainly felt both (early EJB). Big vendors are in the right position to exploit it.
comment at 18. September 2005