The IT Strategy Letter
July 7, 2003
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Loosely Coupled--Now Available as a PDF (at a 63% Discount)
As an alternative to the hardcopy edition, you can now download my latest book in PDF format at a substantial discount. We're starting with BitPass, a new and convenient online micropayment and content-management technology. It's easy to setup a BitPass account--even easier if you already use PayPal. From the time you purchase the eBook version, you have 7 days during which you can download the content up to 10 times. The PDF files can be printed, but the text cannot be copied or modified. Amazon.com Review of the Week:
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"If
you read only one book on Web services, this is it."|
Java, Java Everywhere? In his Ahead of the Curve column in the June 23 issue of Infoworld, Tom Yeager asks, "Without .Net, what can Microsoft use to present its software as a unified, integrated offering?" He suggests that Sun's Java has "won" the battle for the mobile/wireless platform. While Sun may indeed have won this battle, Tom misses the big picture: that Sun has lost the war. On December 23, 2002, a US federal judge ordered Microsoft to include Sun's Java runtime environment with the Windows family of operating systems. Two years earlier, Microsoft settled a lawsuit brought by Sun Microsystems, and agreed to pay Sun $20 million. Sun may have won these battles in the courts, but the victories were largely symbolic because Microsoft managed to find an end-run solution around the attempt to make Java ubiquitous. Microsoft has bigger plans, and they're based on web services. Here's just one example: Microsoft controls the world's desktops, but it has far less clout in the market for small mobile devices such as PDAs and cell phones. However, rather than roll over and play dead--giving up the mobile market altogether--Microsoft has another opportunity to take the lion's share of mobile-device revenues. As cell phones and PDAs become commodities, the value of device-resident software (such as operating systems, games, and other programs that run within the devices) will approach zero. Few people will pay more for a Java-based phone than for one that isn't. But the market for extra-cost and remotely hosted services for those devices will continue to increase. These services include mobile e-commerce (m-commerce), instant messaging (IM), location-based services (LBS) such as advertising-driven restaurant finders, and many others. Java was supposed to be the "write once, run anywhere" technology. Its model is based on portable source and executable intermediate code. Web services, on the other hand, are the "write once, access from anywhere" solution. No porting is required. Services can be utilized from anywhere. There's little inherent value in a programming language, but there's tremendous value in a universally accessible service. To win the lucrative remotely hosted service business, Microsoft (or anyone else) needed to find a way that its services could work with all mobile devices, not just those based on Java or some other platform. The key was to convince all handheld device manufacturers to use one technology. It could have been Java, in which case Sun would have been able to control the technology used to link the mobile devices to remote services. But that didn't happen. Java may be on a healthy majority of the mobile platforms, but it still isn't ubiquitous. The only way to convince all vendors to adopt a single interface technology was to truly give it away--not under some strict licensing program as Sun did with Java, but free and unencumbered. Web services is such a technology, and by convincing virtually every vendor to support it, Microsoft guaranteed it will be able to deploy services that can be reached by every device, even those based on Java. It's a brilliant strategy, and one that allowed Microsoft to leapfrog over Java; to make Java a non-issue. The competition is no longer about the language or even the platform. Instead, thanks to web services, vendors' offerings can interoperate at a higher level--above the operating system or programming language. The agreement by competing vendors to work together to develop full web-services interoperability is a vector that's critical for the emergence and success of web services. [The above is an excerpt from Loosely Coupled: The Missing Pieces of Web Services.] Web services--along with SOAP and XML--will be ubiquitous. Java won't be. As much as I like Java (it's been my platform of choice since I first specified it for a major project in 1996), it's just one of many programming languages and runtime environments that compete for the low-value part of the bigger picture. Flash: Just as I was posting this, CNET's
News.com reported, "A federal appeals court dealt a legal setback
to Sun Microsystems on Thursday, tossing out most of a preliminary
injunction requiring Microsoft to carry its rival's version of an
interpreter for the Java programming language." |
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Suck Less Isn't Progress. This good interview with Kent Beck by Scott Plamondon on IBM developerWorks will make you want to buy Kent's 1999 book, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change, if you haven't read it already. Beck is the father of extreme programming (XP). Some entertaining quips from the interview include:
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Rethinking
Authentication. Carol Coye Benson of Glenbrook Partners
has posted a teaser for her new report on "The Impact of the Liberty
Alliance Phase 2 Initiative." I've only seen the TOC and a tantalizing
1-page executive overview of the full 32-page report. Carol knows
I'll probably disagree with at least some of what she's written.
I'm sure the comment, "For consumers, shared authentication will
provide a simplified, more streamlined online experience," was written
just for me. (Sure, Doug!) But unless she sends me a copy, I'll
have to pay $995 like everyone else if I want to argue with her.
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IBM
Tests Web Services SLA Technology. "The SLA enforcing technology
will be bundled into WebSphere's enterprise edition in six to 12
months...Smaller Web services players, such as Actional
Corp., AmberPoint Inc.,
Blue Titan Software Inc.,
Confluent Software Inc.,
and Digital Evolution Inc., offer
some type of SLA management in their offerings; other big players,
such as BMC Software Inc. and Computer Associates International
Inc., have Web services SLA management on their road maps as well."
[Source: eWeek] |
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Catalog
Your Services. META Group analyst Daniel Sholler suggests
that, 'IT organizations must inventory and define their catalogs
of operational, technical, and business application services. Each
service definition should stipulate the appropriate users and use
cases for the service, the service interface, and the service level
provided as well as the value structure, chargeback and funding
approach. These service catalogs should be documented and "marketed"
to the intended users both inside and outside the IT organization.'
[Source: CIO.com] Take this one literally. Create a catalog in XML
based on WSDL. Don't bother with UDDI. |
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SOAP
1.2 Released. W3C released the latest ratified version of
SOAP. |
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Ecademy
Members' Special Edition of Loosely Coupled. The more than
20,000 members of U.K.-based Ecademy can now purchase a special
edition of Loosely Coupled:
The Missing Pieces of Web Services. Through an arrangement with
RDS Press, the new Ecademy Press offers my new book to their members
for only £25.00. |
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Now Hear This! IT Conversations: New Ideas Through Your Headphones! IT Conversations are recorded (audio) interviews with the gurus of information technology. They're a new production of RDS Strategies LLC, and we hope you'll enjoy them. Stream IT Conversations to your desktop or laptop, or download them into your MP3 player and listen to them while you drive, workout, or sit on the beach with that piña colada. New since the last IT Strategy Letter:
Previously announced conversations:
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Must
Be Present to Win. My latest column for The Web Host Industry
Review, in which I offer financial advice to small- and medium-sized
web-hosting vendors. |
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CIO Radio.
I've only been producing IT
Conversations for a few weeks, but I've just discovered this
treasure-trove of recorded audio interviews going back five years!
Make sure you use the Browse by Category pull-down on the upper-right
corner to find many more recordings than appear on the front page.
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How
to Compare Hosting Vendors. Netcraft has announced an online
comparison of 50 of the top web-hosting vendors. Measurements
include outages, failed connection requests, DNS resolution time,
and first-byte time. The Netcraft report is free. This particular
report analyzes hosting vendors, not specific web sites. |
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Apache
Has Precisely 31 Bugs. "Code in the Apache open source Web
server Version 2.1 is on par with that found in commercial equivalents,
according to a study by Reasoning, which provides code inspection
services." I don't know why they had to do all that reasearch. Just
ask anyone who's had to run even a medium-sized web site. If they
found "31 software defects in 58,944 lines of source code," I hope
they fixed 'em while they were at it. [Source: InfoWorld.] |
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Who
Are Those Guys? In case you wonder whether you can rely
on the flaky developers of open-source products, consider that "58
percent of the open-source community is made up of professional
IT administrators and programmers (with 11 years of professional
experience, on average), and 30 percent of them will have to answer
to their bosses if they don't write open-source code." That should
help make your open-source case for the CFO and the Board of Directors.
[Back in March, Chris Kock wrote this interesting sidebar to a feature
article on Your
Opensource Plan in CIO Magazine.] |
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Good
Luck to the Echo Project. RSS has been a messy specification,
subject to personal politics and name calling among people claiming
control over it. Now, Sam Ruby has formed The Echo Project to develop
a solid successor that transcends the pettiness and adopts the best
ideas from all sources. No politics--just good design with
input from everyone. It's a bold move with incredible support
from the blogging and content-management communities. It appears
that Sam's employer (IBM) have given him their blessing to spend
time on this. I wish the project well. Count me among the supporters!
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July 7: A Big Week for Conferences. So many conferences this week, I had trouble figuring out which one(s) to attend:
I was all set to attend the Open-Source Conference, particularly
since I'm planning a number of IT
Conversations on open source. But I finally opted for the Burton
Group conference. I'm working on some digital-identity projects,
and besides...it's closer to home. Not presenting, just listening
and learning. Look for me there. |
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Presentations, Conferences, and Webcasts
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The IT Strategy Letter is published weekly by RDS Strategies LLC. Much -- but not all -- of the content is published earlier in Doug Kaye's weblogs.
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