Pinderkent

One thing I've noticed getting more and more common is the use of survey hovers on the Web sites of a variety of companies. A typical scenario involves me going to their site to read up on one or more of their products, only to encounter a hover popup requesting me to take some survey, usually about the Web site itself. A good example of this is on Intel's Web site:

These survey hovers are too intrusive, especially on commercial sites. When I'm focused on finding the best product to buy, I want to be seeing product specifications and prices. I don't want to be distracted with survey participation requests.

Now, I could always take the survey, and hope there's some area where I can add my own comments and explain my annoyance with the survey popups. But somehow I think that my participation in the survey would be misconstrued to mean that the survey hovers are in fact working, and getting people to take the survey, ignoring the fact that the user suggestion is to drop the survey hovers. So I'll write about it here instead, and hope that some marketing folks see this posting.

I've got nothing against the surveys themselves, and can understand the need for customer feedback. I just really dislike the in-your-face approach of these hovers. From my perspective, they do more harm than whatever good they might bring. When on a commercial Web site, these hovers distract me (and probably others, as well) from focusing on the company's products, which can negatively affect my purchase of said products.

Today I read an article that discussed a variety of issues relating to Microsoft Windows today, including the general disappointment surrounding Windows Vista, and the apparent lack of interest in Windows 7, especially in the enterprise. It goes on to suggest that Microsoft themselves are responsible for this, and Apple will gain the most from this situation.

I don't think we're really seeing Microsoft tarnishing the Windows brand. In some sense, it's not even possible for them to do that. Many people, and not just Mac users, have an extremely low opinion of Windows to begin with, along with many of Microsoft's other software products. Although the NT-based systems typically don't suffer as badly from the chronic crashes and security flaws that plagued Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows ME, users of those earlier versions will forever associate the names "Microsoft" and "Windows" with poor-quality software. Even today, I rarely meet people who outright like Windows. Most of its users just seem to tolerate it.

If anything is causing Windows to become more irrelevant, it's the widespread move towards Web-based applications. This isn't a novel observation, by any means. It has been obvious for some time now that many applications that were formerly desktop apps have been replaced by Web-based alternatives for a large number of people. People using Web-based email services like Microsoft's own Windows Live Hotmail and GMail instead of desktop mail clients is one significant example.

The move towards Web-based applications is a trend that has been common within enterprise software development for years now. More and more companies are replacing what were traditionally desktop applications with Web-based alternatives. Now this often isn't a good idea; there are some applications that are much better left as standalone apps. But in many domains, the software the users are interacting with is solely browser-based, and thus the underlying desktop operating system is essentially irrelevant.

When the user is interacting mainly with a Web browser, it really doesn't matter what operating system is underlying it. Mozilla Firefox and Opera alone are typically good enough for using most Web-based apps. So the need for Microsoft's software is diminished. This is why GNU/Linux has become more appealing for many enterprise users. It's not about GNU/Linux being more capable than Windows, but rather the opposite; it's easier and cheaper to strip GNU/Linux down to provide just the bare essentials for running the browser used to access the Web applications.

Microsoft saw the threat that Web-based apps posed to desktop applications, and put forth their Windows Live and Office Live initiatives. I'm not sure if these have been as successful as Microsoft would have hoped. In my experience, I've seen little to no serious adoption of these technologies in enterprise settings. This is one area where Web-based applications typically aren't as useful or acceptable. Many enterprise users want greater control over their documents, namely where they are stored and who can access them.

I think it's doubtful that Apple will truly make significant inroads into the enterprise. While some such users will likely switch to Apple's hardware and software, and others will no doubt consider it, given the current cost of Apple's offerings I don't see it happening on a wide scale. Much enterprise computing has been driven by large purchases of lower-quality and very low-cost PCs. As mentioned before, with many organizations moving towards Web-based applications, the need for overly powerful PCs is diminished. With low-end PCs still being suitable, many IT managers will need to cut costs by using GNU/Linux instead of Windows, rather than purchasing more expensive hardware/software combinations from Apple.

So we're likely looking at a more diversified computing world, with some users using desktop apps, others mainly using Web-based apps, and many using a mix of both. It's very unlikely that we'll see Apple's products, or any other company's products, achieve the same market share that Windows holds. There's just too much impetus at this time for such significant changes, even if future versions of Windows are as poor as Windows Vista was.

Today we finally heard the sad news about what's probably going to be the end of SGI. This doesn't come as a surprise to anyone who follows the industry, of course. SGI's fortunes have been steadily declining for the past decade. But it's still humbling to think of how what was once a great company could fall so far.

The Silicon Graphics of the 1980s and 1990s can perhaps best be compared to Apple today. There was always a certain excitement around SGI's offerings, often due to their quality and power, but also due to their unique flair. This really isn't surprising; they were at the forefront of computer graphics technology. Their systems allowed for the creation of what were, at the time, very spectacular visual effects. Seeing an SGI system at work didn't just leave a strong visual impression of whatever was rendered, however. The unique designs of many of their systems also left an impression.

SGI is best known for their MIPS-based systems, their IRIX operating system, and OpenGL. In terms of hardware, SGI was typically at the forefront of the market. For instance, they offered 64-bit MIPS systems in the early 1990s. This may not seem like much now, but it wasn't until a decade later that we saw the x86 world start to move towards 64-bit computing. And in terms of advanced graphics hardware, they led the way for many years.

Although I didn't work with companies who used SGI workstations for their high-end graphics capabilities, I did use an Indy workstation for some time during the 1990s, and was able to work with some companies who used SGI systems as servers because of their power and flexibility. And as servers, they were always very reliable, and often a pleasure to work with compared to the UNIX-based offerings of various other vendors.

Their IRIX operating system was always interesting to work with. During the time when I worked with such systems, they'd already moved to X and 4Dwm. While I always sort of preferred CDE, 4Dwm nevertheless did provide a unique desktop experience.

Aside from its graphical nature, IRIX was always known for scaling quite well. Given the needs of many of SGI's customers, high performance was always a necessity, and scaling well was typically the only way to get that sort of performance given the hardware of the day. One aspect of IRIX that was particularly interesting was its XFS filesystem. Being a 64-bit journaled filesystem, it was always capable of reliably storing huge amounts of data. While this was necessary for those doing video capture and editing, for instance, it nevertheless proved very useful for others who needed to store huge amounts of non-graphical data. Thankfully, XFS was released as open source software, and has been integrated with the Linux kernel. Even today, fifteen years after it was first released, XFS is still a very usable and practical filesystem, employed by many.

For some time, SGI had many of the brightest minds in the field of computer graphics working for them. OpenGL was one of their notable achievements. Like XFS, they were quite open with OpenGL, and thus it flourished, with it now being well-supported on many modern operating systems and graphics hardware. Just over a week ago the Khronos Group announced the release of the OpenGL 3.1 specification.

One thing about some SGI workstations is that they had a distinct appearance. Take their O2 and Octane systems, for instance. Both offered curved designs with uniquely powerful color schemes. It was easy to recognize such systems, even from a distance, in much the same was as many of Apple's designs stand out. And for their systems with a less-remarkable appearance, the 3D wire cube logo they used to use always made their systems identifiable.

It's unfortunate to see SGI end like this. Even if their products were expensive, they were typically quite innovative, and were the sort of products that one could get genuinely excited about. Not only did they give their systems a unique appearance, but they followed through and produced systems that were very capable, extremely powerful for the time, and generally quite reliable. Unfortunately, market pressure from below took its toll on SGI. Many of their higher-end customers reportedly moved towards commodity hardware. The loss of talent to companies like NVIDIA and ATI didn't help the situation, either. And although their future may be limited, it's likely that we'll see at least some of their work live on for some time in the form of XFS and OpenGL. Hopefully it's not forgotten where such achievements originated.

As the title of Will McGugan's On Ego and Software Development article clearly states, it discusses the impact that developer ego has on software projects. One of the impacts he mentions is that of rewrites of inherited codebases. His suggestion is that the developers who inherit the code often think that the existing code is poorly written, and believe that they could do it far better. I'm not sure that this is typically the justification for a rewrite, especially in business settings.

Over the years I have been involved with many projects involving a transfer of a significant amount of code. As with much software, this code may not be poorly written, but typically isn't as clean as it could be. Depending on the setting, the code may have been written very quickly, it may be unnecessarily complex, it may have been added to haphazardly over the years, and it may have been developed by programmers who weren't overly talented. Even if there's no urge to rewrite the software initially, such ideas can arise once the new developers scope out how much work it will take to come up to speed with the existing code.

The amount of time and effort that it takes to become familiar with an existing codebase depends on a wide variety of factors. The languages, libraries, frameworks and other technologies used are likely the most significant factors, especially when considering the new developers' familiarity with them. There may be issues surrounding the deployment environment. The new developers may not be overly familiar with the business domain the software serves. The quality of the original code is a factor, as well. And those are just a few of the issues that need to be considered.

Sometimes the effort necessary to become adequately familiar with the existing code far exceeds the time it would take the developers to rewrite and test the code in question. This is where we often see rewrites taking place. It's not so much about the new developers caving to their egos and thinking they can do it better. It's actually more about the developers recognizing their own weakness in the situation, namely the scale of the difficulties they would face were they to work with the existing code rather than rewriting it anew. The decision to rewrite ends up being almost purely economically-driven, rather than ego-driven.

There have been reports recently suggesting that IBM may soon acquire Sun Microsystems. For those of us in IT, acquisitions of these types are always a big deal. While Sun's server hardware is widely deployed and of great importance to many, my interest is mainly in software, so that's the area I'll focus on in this article.

In the software world, Sun is most well known for Java and Solaris. I suspect that we'll see two very different outcomes for these technologies if an acquisition does occur. It's difficult to say what will happen for some of the smaller or more obscure software products and projects that Sun was involved with, such as OpenOffice.org and NetBeans.

In terms of Java, I don't think we'd see much, if any, negative change. IBM has embraced Java, and understands its use, at least for business users. For some time now they've provided their own JDKs for a number of platforms. Java also plays a significant role in their prominent WebSphere Application Server. They're actively involved with developing new Java-based technologies. And their involvement and contributions to Eclipse have had a huge impact within the development community.

In some respects, such an acquisition may be quite good for Java. Although known for generally being more conservative, IBM does have the resources needed to make the changes to the Java language and platform that are necessary for it to compete better with Microsoft's .NET platform. We need to see half-baked technologies like JavaFX and JavaFX Script discarded. But we also need to see functional or object-functional languages like Clojure and Scala perhaps brought in as core components of the platform.

If IBM put their weight behind such technologies, we very well may see more developers be willing to adopt them. As we move into a world with massively multi-core CPUs, we will need to make use of functional programming techniques to write scalable software that effectively uses such hardware. Given IBM's (and Sun's) emphasis on high-end server hardware, a willingness to adopt and support Scala and Clojure could really put them in the lead in this area.

Things don't look as good in terms of operating systems. As basically everyone in the industry knows, Sun has offered Solaris for years, while IBM has offered AIX. While both high-end UNIX-based operating systems, I'm not certain if they could be successfully integrated. At a technical level, I suspect they are just too different.

If an acquisition were to take place, I imagine that Solaris would be supported for some time, but eventually deprecated in favor of AIX. This would be similar to what happened to Tru64 UNIX when HP and Compaq merged. If I recall correctly, HP originally planned to transition Tru64's more advanced features to HP-UX, but this didn't end up happening, for the most part. Now Tru64 is essentially on its last legs.

Given that Sun has released much of the Solaris source code over the past few years in the form of the OpenSolaris project, it seems likely that it will live on in at least some form. A truly self-sustaining community, akin to the Ubuntu project for Linux never seemed to develop, however. So it's difficult to say how much, if any, innovation we'd see out of the OpenSolaris project were Sun no longer supporting it.

Another interesting area to consider is that of the MySQL-related technologies and business that fell into Sun's fold with their acquisition of MySQL AB at the beginning of 2008. Given IBM's pivotal role in the development of relational databases, and their offering of the very solid and professional DB2 family of database products, MySQL's future in such an organization seems quite limited. Even within the open source community, MySQL is generally considered an inferior RDBMS. I really can't see it having much of a future, especially with Marten Mickos and Monty Widenius out of the picture.

We'll just have to wait and see what comes out of these rumors. But in terms of the software world, such an acquisition could have some significant impacts. They'd mainly be felt by those working with and developing enterprise systems, but may still be noticed by others, including, for example, OpenOffice.org users. So I see such an acquisition as potentially being good for Java, but less so for the Solaris, and potentially disastrous for MySQL.