Beyond Java - Bruce Tate [10]
El Niño, the split jet stream, filtered across the ocean and brought warm, moist air right across Texas. It collided with the cooler air of a cold front. The pressure system in the South fed a rotation, and locked the cool front in place. The warm air exploded into the cold and produced a perfect storm. We opened the topological maps and found a stream that had never been run. It had the steepness and geographical features that we were looking for. It simply had not had enough water. As we planned the trip, the mighty storm hurled a string of consecutive lightning bolts right near a hilltop, less than a mile away. Distracted, we stared into the night, alternately black and blinding.
Storm Warnings
To know where Java is going, you've got to know where it came from. You need to remember the conditions that caused us to leave the existing dominant languages in droves. You must understand the economic forces that drove the revolution. And you cannot forget the sentiment of the time that pried so many of us away from C++, and other programming languages for the Internet.
In 1995, Java was working its way through the labs of Sun Microsystems, unborn. Sun garnered attention as a champion of standards, and for bringing Unix out of the academic ghetto, but it was not a major player in development environments or programming languages. Frustrations, driven by economics but stemming from inadequacies in programming languages and programming models, rippled through the community in another kind of gathering storm.
Economics of Client-Server Computing
Frustration with long development cycles and inadequate user interfaces drove many companies to move off of mainframe computers. At first, the movement amounted to nothing more than a trickle. As the cost-cutting financial offices measured the software and hardware costs of IBM versus Microsoft on Intel, the trickle became a flood.
But the wave of migrating customers did not consider all the costs. The rapid movements from mainframes to Intel servers drove the first tsunami of chaos because the client-server movement hid significant costs:
Management costs skyrocketed. It was too difficult to deploy tiny changes to hundreds of fat clients. Technologists could not figure out how to maintain the many desktop applications and frameworks necessary to make the architecture go.
Many customers became increasingly wary of a gathering Microsoft monopoly.
The tools of the day made it easy to get started, but did not handle complexity well. Typical customers simply could not make them scale.
Decision makers were caught between the pragmatic approach of a centrally managed solution and the adaptability and lower costs of Intel-based servers. They waited for a better solution, and the clouds darkened.
Microsoft
While developers struggled with C++, Microsoft planned to hammer the final nails in the coffin of OS/2, a competing operating system that it once created, but abandoned to IBM. So Microsoft grew in stature and influence, and it learned to cater to developers very well. Companies like IBM dominated the infrastructure groups (called IT for information technology). Microsoft didn't care. It went straight to the lines of business that used IT applications. Offering quick turnaround time with Excel macros and Visual Basic applications, it stole a large part of development mindshare across the world. Screw IT. The line of business could build the applications itself, and involve IT only after the fact, to clean up the resulting mess.
Microsoft grew, and some of the same