2009 Predictions Revisited

As promised, I'm coming back to revisit my predictions for 2009 to see how I've done. As predicted by virtue of my fuzziness, I was mostly right on most subjects. Let's go into particulars!

Messaging Breaking Out
I think I did pretty well there. We've still not got a final AMQP 1.0, but just following Twitter and blogs I'm seeing a lot more people, particularly from the non-financial world, starting to use messaging in their applications.

Cloud Becoming Less Buzzy
Complete strike-out here. The same people arguing amongst themselves over what is "cloud" is still going on. That being said, the use of utility computing (as I prefer to call it) is on the rise, and Amazon has come up with so many innovations in the space that it's hard to keep track.

Java Stagnating
Mixed bag on this one I have to say. Java has definitely stagnated, and we still don't have a Java 7. That being said, it looks like the delayed Java 7 may actually give us the chance to see JSR-310 and closures coming into the language, which would be a very positive development.

Java stagnating leads nicely into my next subject (yes, I'm going out of order now):

Non-Traditional Languages Breaking Out
I think I hit this one right on the head. The stagnation of Java, and prominent proponents of systems like Scala and Groovy, are seeing people being more willing than ever to consider these languages the "next Java". Scala in particular has gone from an interesting programming language to one which is seeing mass adoption in enterprises and in web shops.

C# Over-Expanding
To be honest, I have no idea how I did here. I've found myself completely and utterly outside of the C# ecosystem, so I'll have to leave it to one of my faithful readers to fill me in on how I did here.

Social Networking Losing Money
Yep, I failed here. Twitter's probably profitable, Facebook is almost certainly gearing up for an IPO. I was completely wrong here.

But it's not just the social networks themselves, social gaming has gone from an interesting idea to one that makes lots of money, indicating that the space of social networking has started to turn profitable not just for network providers, but also for network ecosystem partners.

Sun Radically Restructuring
I think I can say I was right here, in that they're radically restructuring themselves into Snoracle.

Next year's predictions on the way!

My Open Letter to the European Competition Commissioner

Monty urged me to help save MySQL. I couldn't possibly refuse such an offer.

Dear Competition Commissioner:

I am the Chief Executive and Technology Officer for OpenGamma, a financial technology startup located in the United Kingdom. I am writing to urge you to immediately and unconditionally approve the merger of Oracle and Sun.

I have a long standing history with both the Open Source and Database communities, having worked for a number of database startups in the United States of America, as well as working at early-stage companies making use and refining a number of Open Source technologies. I also have experience working at Oracle during a summer internship while I was attending the University of California at Berkeley.

Furthermore, in my more recent career as a consumer (rather than producer) of database technologies, I have setup and managed numerous, large MySQL installations, including one with more than 10 nodes and 150GB of active data (and several terabytes of archive data) in the financial services industry. I have also been a customer of Oracle's database technology for systems even larger.

In my mind, there is no logical reason to reject this merger based on considerations for the MySQL technology.

First of all, as a consumer of database technologies, I can tell you that Oracle and MySQL simply do not compete in the marketplace. While customers have replaced Oracle with MySQL, the applications based on Oracle that were ported to MySQL were never good candidates for Oracle and would have been ported to another database engine in due course as Oracle moves to the highest end of the market. Customers have numerous options for porting their applications off of Oracle onto a lower-cost database engine; MySQL simply has the most brand recognition in this space. Furthermore, MySQL has been used as a pricing lever by Oracle customers rather than an active option for migration.

That implies that Oracle's ownership of MySQL might see a reduction in competition for Oracle's core product, but there is a flourishing Open Source database market these days (which there wasn't when MySQL was originally created): Ingres, Firebird, LucidDB and PostgreSQL are all far more applicable to the Oracle customer base than MySQL is. Even if MySQL development were to come to an immediate halt, this wouldn't harm consumers in a such an extremely competitive environment.

However, the continued uncertainty over the Sun acquisition is potentially far more anticompetitive for consumers of technology as a whole: Sun has a number of competitive products with far greater applicability than MySQL (including their storage, networking, and computer chip technology). Allowing those products to die because Sun ran out of cash during this phase of its life would be extremely and permanently damaging to the overall computer industry inside Europe, and reduce competition significantly. Delaying this merger over the matter of MySQL would result in far greater anticompetitive results to European consumers of computing technology than even the worst case arguments of biased, self-interested advocates in this matter.

Thank you for your time, and once again, I urge you to approve this merger unconditionally and without further delay.

Sincerely Yours,

Kirk Wylie
Chief Executive Officer
OpenGamma

Oracle + Sun : A Java Perspective

Smarter people than I have written about this, but having worked at several of the major players here (a summer at Oracle proper, 12 months at BEA working on WebLogic Server, 2 years working at M7, which got bought by BEA, which got bought by Oracle), I figured I'd pipe in my $0.02.

My #1 concern here is that Larry is going to attempt to use everything in the IP arsenal that he's just acquired to screw IBM. He's done it before, he'll probably continue to do it. Considering the amount of investment that IBM has made into the Java ecosystem (at least as much as BEA, particularly when you consider Eclipse), and the amount of hostility between Oracle and IBM, this wouldn't surprise me one whit. Towards, that end, here's what I'd like to see clarification on:

• Eclipse/SWT. For too long Sun's ridiculous love-fest with NetBeans and Swing has blocked any reasonable approach towards dealing with Eclipse and SWT. The worry that I have here is that since Eclipse == IBM in many people's minds, and both JDeveloper and NetBeans are now under the same company umbrella, Oracle may decide to let commercial considerations (sticking it to IBM) and staff considerations (keeping Sun developers who have a thing for NetBeans, plus everybody internally who's committed to JDeveloper) override ecosystem considerations (we all like Eclipse way more than NetBeans or JDeveloper). My request: please properly support SWT. Not to the exclusion of Swing, but don't fight against it.
• OSGi. OSGi is probably tainted by Sun as being an Eclipse-technology, and therefore hurting NetBeans and helping IBM or some similar ridiculousness. Support it, please, and kill off anything whose sole raison d'etre is to replace it with something lamer. Modularizing the JRE is one thing, providing something completely useless except to replace OSGi is something altogether different.
• Open Java Implementations. Stephen Colebourne has been talking about this at length, and blogged about the handover. Please don't be such jerks on the JCP.
• Open Source Projects. Whither Glassfish and Metro and all the rest of it? They compete with existing BEA/Oracle assets, but are extremely valuable in making the ecosystem valuable enough to allow Oracle to extract value from their proprietary assets.
• API Neutrality. One thing Sun has been good at, because they've never had any world-beating middleware or application infrastructure technologies, is helping to craft APIs that are by and large vendor neutral (such as JDBC and JMS). Oracle, however, doesn't. Is Oracle going to follow a path like Microsoft has with the .Net APIs, where there's enhanced support for whatever Microsoft is shilling and second-class support for everything else (ADO.Net anyone?), or is it going to realize that supporting the ecosystem means vendor neutrality as much as possible? Sun had no choice as all their app infrastructure is second-rate at best, but Oracle has a choice.
• The Whole JCP Itself. What's going to happen to it? How is Oracle going to behave in general? Will we see projects falling out from under the JCP umbrella going forward?
• ZFS [1]. ZFS rocks. Massively. But Oracle's been working on Btrfs in part because Sun refuses to allow ZFS to be licensed in such a way that it can be included in the Linux kernel. Given Oracle's investment in Linux, we can has ZFS in Linux?

Mostly, I think we still have yet to see whether Oracle is going to behave like the BEA side, or the Oracle side: is Oracle going to help build the ecosystem, or is it going to use its new IP assets for proprietary advantage against IBM and Microsoft? I hope it's the former, but only time will tell.

Footnotes

[1]: Yes, it's not Java. But really, I can has? Plz?

2009 Predictions

Just a quick set of predictions for 2009. I'll revisit nearer the end of the year to see how I've done.

Messaging Breaks Out
Right now asynchronous systems, particularly ones using message oriented middleware, are still pretty fringe. However, even though I disagree with the technology choice, techniques like XMPP are starting to bring asynchronous communications to the masses. I predict that the extension of XMPP, the forthcoming standardization of AMQP, new infrastructure being developed (like RabbitMQ, OpenAMQ, and Qpid), and extension to new programming languages and application execution environments will all drive more and more developers to finally end polling for updates.

Cloud Will Become Less Buzzy
Right now Cloud/Utility computing is really too buzzy to make heads or tails of, and I think it's suffering from that: when you say "Cloud Computing", it means both nothing and anything. I think 2009 will be the year that people start to solidify what works best in a utility computing space versus a local hosted space, and where hosting providers get mature enough and technology becomes mainstream enough that there's an assumption of utility over local hosting.

Java Will Stagnate
I predict that Java 7, if it even hits by the end of the year, will be pretty anemic and, quite frankly, lame. There will be some interesting enhancements to the JVM, but that's pretty much all that's going to be noteworthy.

C# Will Over-Expand
The entire Microsoft ecosystem will expand and grow beyond the ability of typical Microsoft stack developers to keep up. We're already seeing it with WinForms vs. WPF, LINQ vs. ADO.NET Entity Framework, and whole new technologies like WCF. I predict by the end of the year the Microsoft ecosystem has become so bewildering that while leaders in the community push for more change, day-to-day developers push for a halt to just absorb what's been happening.

Non-Traditional VM Languages Will Break Out
Right now most developers in enterprise systems are coding against the "core" languages (C#, VB.Net, Java) against their respective VMs. This reflects in no small part the maturity and power of their underlying runtimes (the CLR and JVM respectively), but the leading edge of the communities have already started to explore other languages that offer concrete advantages (F#, Scala, Groovy) on the tight runtimes that are already available. This will be the year that those actually break out of the leading edge and into mainstream use.

No-One In Social Networking Makes Money
I still think, by the end of 2009, there won't be a player in the social networking space that is cashflow positive, and I don't think it'll be by choice. I think the technology is so disruptive that we still haven't seen the "right way" to monetize it yet.

Sun Radically Restructures
Sun can't keep burning through cash the way they have been, and they can't continue to have such a chaotic story. At some point in 2009, Sun will relatively radically restructure itself in a bid for survival. Hopefully they'll have read my analysis (part 1, part 2). At the very least, they'll change their ticker away from JAVA.

I think you'll note that all my predictions are fuzzy. That's so that in December, 2009 when we revisit them, we can determine that I was partially right on nearly all of them.

Sun: Split Up, Yo

Since the whole pick-on-sun meme has really taken off, I figured I'd post some more on the current situation, because El Reg's take led me to believe that the only really positive outcome is complete dismemberment.

Look back at my previous posting. Logically, you've got several distinct companies floating about in that mess of Fail:

• Legacy SPARC, including Niagara. Sell it to Fujitsu and give up. Although the Niagara stuff may be cool, if you can't get it price/performance competitive with x86 just give up and use it for having a forward migration path for your existing customers.
• Storage. This would include the StorageTek stuff, Thumper, FishWorks, and the Open Storage stuff. Separate company, which might even be able to stand on its own. Otherwise, find someone like Dell who's sick of OEMing EMC stuff and sell the business to them.
• Software. Take all the open source stuff you have (including and especially Solaris) and give it to a new company which doesn't have anybody working for it who has ever worked for the hardware business in any form (in fact, it should probably be run by non-Sun people). Allow them to create an alternative to Novell and Red Hat as a multi-product open source company, completely ignoring your Sparc lines of business. I guarantee that this would result in the software changes that the community wants (ZFS with a Linux-friendly license) because it's in the best interest of such a company, but not in the best interest of the Sun hardware business. All those retarded decisions you've made in software seem to be to try to push your legacy hardware; free the company from that, and it'll do some great stuff.
  
• Other Stuff. This is the x86 stuff and the HPC stuff (Constellation, blades) and everything else. Leave this as a rump hardware company, allowed and encouraged to compete with the Fujitsu-owned Sparc business. Alternatively, sell it to one of the Asian manufacturers that wants to bootstrap a server business (Asus?). I think it'd do quite well actually.

The simple fact is that if you look at it this way, Sun makes logical sense as 4 different companies, and really they're not getting any synergies out of having them all as one company, so why keep pretending? Split it up completely and maybe the world will be a better place.

If nothing else, we could all get on with our lives and stop blabbing on about it.

TBray Response: Sun Should Stop Sucking

(Talking about Tim Bray's opinion on what Sun should do).

As someone who's used a lot of Sun's products, here's my response as to what you can do, but more importantly, what you probably actually will do.

Price Your Hardware Less
Let's look at the Niagara vs. x86

• T5140 base (dual 4-core T2+ processors, 8GB of RAM, some disks) is $15k.
• X4140 (dual 4-core Opteron processors, 8GB of RAM, lots more disks) is $5.6k.
• X4150 (dual 4-core Xeon processors, 8GB of RAM, same disks as the X4140) is $7.3k.

Lemme get this straight, Tim: you think that the web application deployment crowd are willing to spend about 2-3 times the price for your magical CMT platform? Really? Have you met your typical hosting company? Or have you been spending so long at Sun you don't know what people actually care about?

Here's the thing: you actually make good hardware. The X4140? Great server. Your Niagara processors? Probably pretty good (never had a chance to play with one yet). Constellation? Great IB switch. The multithreaded 10GbE NICs? Pretty good hardware if you have an app that is multi-socket based. But people aren't going to run web applications on something that's more than twice the price; web applications are all about horizontal scaleout. Unless your hardware is 2x the performance for 2x the price, you're going to fail.

Quit Confusing Your Branding
We get it. You invented Java. Good on you. I like Java. That's not an excuse for:

• Changing your stock ticker to JAVA.
• Calling every single thing you can, even when it doesn't involve Java at all (Sun Java System Messaging Server, a product which contains precisely 0% Java)
• Grouping completely unrelated products under completely confusing banners (Sun Java Communications Suite, Sun Java System Messaging Server, Sun Java System Application Platform; these are all on your web site as of right now).

When you come up with your next branding exercise, please stop rebranding every single thing you make into one big bag of branding Fail.

Solaris Will Never Beat Linux
Like it or not, Solaris will never beat Linux at this point. You had lots of opportunities to make this not be the case, and you failed. Mostly because of your own stupid decisions, but the simple fact is that at this point, Solaris will never beat Linux for anything other than specialized systems. These are:

• Applications that require it because they were written once 10 years ago and can never change. Milk these guys for as much as you possibly can; it's the Computer Associates business plan and they seem to do okay out of it.
• Storage appliances (CIFS integration and ZFS are good and better than the equivalents in Linux-land).

No matter what Tim says, Solaris will never defeat Linux in the general web application deployment space, and there is absolutely nothing you can ever do to change this. Give up. Give up now. You're way too far behind, you don't get those developers, and you'll never be able to catch up with the state of the world.

The thing is that one of the points that Tim raises, Solaris having such a stable ABI, actually causes them problems in general worldview and software engineering, because it means that they can never actually change anything to make it better. But more than that, it indicates that their core focus is really about all the legacy applications which are tied to their platform, and not about driving new customers to the platform.

What Sun Could Do
Divide yourself logically into the following divisions:

• Legacy Systems. Sparc IV, Solaris, all the old software packages nobody uses, existing StorageTek hardware. Your job is to keep these customers from spending the effort to migrate to something cheaper; no more, no less.
  
• Modern Hardware. Your x86 hardware, IB hardware, networking chipsets, Niagara. Your job is to do advanced development and be technologically advanced, but at least marginally cost competitive.
  
• Open Storage. OpenSolaris, the new Open Storage hardware. Your job here is to provide a new path off all the storage dead ends that you've gone down, and try to eviscerate the big storage vendors who are insanely overpriced at this point.
  
• Goodwill Software. All the stuff you're never really going to make proper money off of, and probably shouldn't have gotten involved in in the first place. MySQL, Java, Glassfish, NetBeans, StarOffice. Your job here is to try to stem the loss that all of these systems are costing you, and keep from allowing their marketing teams from ruining the rest of your branding on profitable products.
  

Note that there are two growth markets in there (Modern Hardware and Open Storage), and the rest is all irrelevant tangents and legacy. The growth markets are where your future lies, and keeping the others around gives you the chance to migrate existing customers to the new platform, keeping your vision of a one-stop-shop IBM killer intact. But you have to be completely honest with yourselves: the existing stuff is legacy and will never go anywhere, and you need to pile resources into the growth areas without confusing your branding or customers.

What Sun Will Do
Here's my predictions:

• Sun will continue to price all their proprietary hardware so absolutely above the costs of generic hardware that only people under serious lockin to their platform even think about buying it, never allowing them to achieve any types of economy of scale.
• Sun will continue to give software products stupid, confusing names. I predict the Sun Java System Enterprise Database Suite being the new name for MySQL.
• Sun will continue to try to drive Solaris to everything through a neverending sequence of initiatives, confusing anybody even considering deploying it, so that you only ever hit the legacy market and Solaris die-hards.
• Sun will continue to invest in stuff that will never ever drive any meaningful revenue to them, but sap massive amounts of engineering resources. To try to justify this to their shareholders, they will come up with confusing branding and marketing initiatives to try to tie everything together.

In short, Sun, I have no fear that you will find some way to drag failure from the claws of oh-so-close. Just like you have for years.