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“Enterprise software” is a social, not technical, phenomenon, is a good write-up on what the “enterprise” part of “enterprise software” means. In it, Kragen Sitaker makes the case that the “enterprise” classification is based purely on the social and business aspects of a product and not on technical qualities:

Third, “enterprise software” is surrounded by consultants who will sell you the service of making it work, as explained above. In some cases, these ecosystems of consultants are competent and highly skilled. In other cases, such as the case of Java, many of them are spectacularly incompetent, vociferous in their ignorance, and prone to attack competing systems. This results directly from the sales process for “enterprise software,” in which expert persuaders gull technically incompetent managers into adopting the software. Managers who aren’t technically well-informed enough to select the software in the first place will also not be well-informed enough to distinguish between competent consultants and incompetent consultants, so both competent and incompetent consultants will flourish — but the competent ones will eventually get sick of it and go elsewhere.

I didn’t really understand this until KnowNow, the startup where I worked, got turned into an enterprise software company by its VCs and management; although I had previously had the opportunity to observe most of the pieces of the puzzle, I had clung to the idea that “enterprise software” was technically better in some way from the software I was used to using. It turns out that the differences are entirely social, not technical, and one of the major differences is that “enterprise software” is under much less pressure to have any technical merit.

This was an elaboration of Kragen’s comments on a post by Justin Gehtland entitled Rails: What would it take?, which includes an excellent comment thread describing real and perceived issues with using Rails (and LAMP in general) in enterprise environments.

I’ve received a small bit of flak from F/OSS purists for displaying excitement around stuff like Dell supporting LAMP and Pfizer going with ActiveGrid. The canonical push-back seems to be that LAMP treading the enterprise path could lead to it adopting the poor technical qualities we associate with many enterprise software packages. My feeling is that recent support for LAMP in the enterprise has come about due to a few rare individuals who have equal experience in both the social game of “enterprise software” and the technical qualities of the LAMP/friends stack.

While I find both the social and technological aspects of “enterprise software” equally disturbing, these companies are showing that you can swap good technology in without necessarily having to re-organize social practices, and that’s important. This makes it possible to take a divide and conquer style approach to infiltrating business IT. You have your technology front: ActiveGrid, SourceLabs, Redhat, Zend, etc. and you have your social front: Weblogs, Cluetrain, F/OSS style peer collaboration, etc. It’s just like Korea.

One of the most interesting characteristics of the Web is that it doesn’t version. The Web is a bona-fide computing ecosystem, and is along with email, one of the killer applications of another system, the Internet, itself designed for high-survivability and to deal with massive physical infrastructure damage (it’s literally nuke-proof). The Web evolves as does the Internet it runs on. Versioning for the Web makes no sense whatsoever.

So what’s this Web 2.0 thing then? Tim O’Reilly feels that it’s a valuable meme:

The reason that the term ‘Web 2.0’ has been bandied about so much since Dale Dougherty came up with it a year and a half ago in a conference planning session (leading to our Web 2.0 Conference) is because it does capture the widespread sense that there’s something qualitatively different about today’s web.

Web 2.0 is the Web for Mr. Safe and his management team. This helps bring shrinkwrap software, advertiser, broadcast and publish media people bringing to the Web, as it actually is, with enough of their old concepts out of their comfort zone. It does however choose to frame the Web in terms of the old models. Given the history of what hapens when old ideas knock up against the Web, it’s arguably risky then, for Mr Safe and his team to actually believe it fully. Sometimes you have to take a phenomenom on its own terms rather than it terms of your existing paradigm . Most recently to see what happens when the old ways don’t carry over, take at look at the IT industry’s Web Services efforts.

Anyone that thinks that the Web is something that evolves according to a release cycle fundamentally doesn’t understand it. If you could version the Web it wouldn’t work properly – support for versioning would be a bug. I think this is why Tim Bray doesn’t like Web 2.0, which is where this recent conversation began:

It’s not only vacuous marketing hype, it can’t possibly be right.

It’s a broken memeof sorts, perhaps one only a dinosaur could enjoy. Other developers like Dare Obasanjo are working through their transition from the Web as place to run a websites to the Web as a place to run platforms. Here’s Obasanjo responding to Tim O’Reilly’s take on Web 2.0:

Reading stuff like Tim O’Reilly’s just leaves me scratching my head. I completely grok the simple concept that folks like me at MSN are no longer just in the business of building web sites, we are building web platforms. Our users are no longer just people interacting with our web sites via Firefox or IE.

But even that idea – web platforms – seems dysfunctional. In the software industry a platform is a chunk of software infrastructure other people innovate on. It’s the closest the industry has ever had to a toll-booth. You build it and they will come, and pay to drive over it – how cool is that? Unfortunately, ‘web platforms’ are based on the collective hallucination that the Web ofers a viable means to support such API based architectural franchises. That being something of a cargo cult suggests it’s unlikely to work. Future franchises will be built around access to data not access to software. As with versioning, if the Web were an operating system or a platform, we’d need to file a bug report against it. Heck, it’s turtles all the way down – being able to file a bug report would be a bug.

Ian Davis meanwhile get closer by describing Web 2.0 as a state of mind:

Here’s my take on it: Web 2.0 is an attitude not a technology. It’s about enabling and encouraging participation through open applications and services. By open I mean technically open with appropriate APIs but also, more importantly, socially open, with rights granted to use the content in new and exciting contexts.

So it seems while the term Web 2.0 might miss the mark for technical types, it has broader value. Here’s Stephen O’Grady’s take on it (from the comments):

Web 2.0 is similar to that of Ajax. in and of itself it’s probably inaccurate, non-descriptive and misses the point. And yet, I’m favor of it. why? For two reasons: 1.) it’s propagated widely enough to have some widespread recognition, and 2.) it neatly packages everything up for the non-digerati who, after all, is the majority of the population.

What’s interesting in all this, is that while the toolsets and technologies are surely getting better, core Web architecture isn’t changing that much. What’s happening is that people’s ability to innovate is improving and that seems to come about by accepting Web thinking as much as any recent improvement in the toolchain. In short, instead of trying to make the Web a good place for your business or technology to function, adapt your business or technology to function well on the Web.

Hot on the heels of O’Reilly’s report of strong demand for dynamic languages we have The Register reporting that Perl, PHP, and Python are on some kind of massive wane:

PHP and Python have each experienced a 25 per cent drop in the last 12 months while Perl fell 20 per cent. Those not planning to evaluate or use either of the three in future projects, meanwhile, is growing - up by as much as 40 per cent in the case of PHP.

The Reg goes on to predict folly for IBM, Oracle, SAP, and Intel - each of which has thrown support behind PHP.

EDC blamed the drop on a failure for PHP, along with Perl and Python, to penetrate the enterprise space. An EDC spokesman predicted that the decline could be halted and reversed with this year’s work between Zend and its new backers.

Hmmm.. I’m not very satisfied with the response they got from Zend, either:

Disputing EDC’s numbers, though, Zend said that its backing from IBM, Oracle, Intel and SAP proved that PHP is a growing market and that these companies have accurately read developer trends.

This argument is crap - backing from large corporations proves nothing about developer trends.

EDS’ sample seems a bit narrow. They polled 400 developers in small, medium and large enterprises across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

This goes strongly against much of what I’ve been observing over the past year. Where are we to assume these huge percentages of developers going? Java? .NET? I don’t buy it.

Or is this some kind of massive migration to Ruby? ;)

This chart showing the number of requests for different languages on O’Reilly’s Code Zoo is interesting:

Yesterday we added two new languages to CodeZoo: Python and Ruby. You can see from the language requests graph, above, the languages for which we got more than a few requests (I’ve left off Cobol and the others that only were requested a couple of times). From this, the choice of Python is completely obvious — it was the winner in the request race, beating out C++ and many other languages that might be considered “larger” by other metrics. In addition to the clear demand for it, Python is a natural fit for O’Reilly, since we publish a great deal of treeware and online material about Python, and cover Python extensively at our conferences (especially at the Open Source Convention taking place this week).

Ruby, however, is tied for fifth on the list, and in raw component counts on our site, it is the smallest of the languages we support. As we’ve discussed on Radar over the past few months, we see Ruby as an emerging force in the open source world, driven by interest in Ruby on Rails, and by the excellent books on Ruby written by the Pragmatic Programmers…

I was actually really surprised at how strongly dynamic languages showed up on this chart. I’m eye-balling it as there aren’t any numbers but Python, PHP, Ruby, and Perl seem to have taken down almost 50% of the requests with C{,#,++} taking down a large majority of the rest. Is this a fair sampling of the general development population? Developers with a web/UNIXy background seem to be over-represented at O’Reilly so its probably a bit skewed, no? Still, the amount of acceptance dynamic languages are gaining is pretty staggering at this point.

Paul Graham:

I can imagine managers at this point saying: what is this guy talking about? What good does it do me to know that my programmers would be more productive working at home on their own projects? I need their asses in here working on version 3.2 of our software, or we’re never going to make the release date.

And it’s true, the benefit that specific manager could derive from the forces I’ve described is near zero. When I say business can learn from open source, I don’t mean any specific business can. I mean business can learn about new conditions the same way a gene pool does. I’m not claiming companies can get smarter, just that dumb ones will die.

Perhaps I should just shut this blog down now?