Innovation in Software

The second article of the day discussing firms few have heard of outside of the industry. Bad habit. Sorry.

VMware makes some pretty interesting technology. Initially their product was as simple as allowing multiple virtual machines to operate on one physical computer. Then came the ability to dynamically move a virtual machine from one physical computer to another, seamlessly. That elegant addition to virtualisation allowed IT managers to condense application servers onto less physical hardware, reducing costs.

Now they’ve spotted that cloud/on-demand services are a possible future and have unveiled a cloud operating system that allows for, quote, “the foundation for internal and external clouds, using federation and standards to bridge cloud infrastructures”.

In other words, sometime next quarter you will be able to build out your data centre in such a way as to ensure that as demands increase, you can easily and seamlessly move some of the applications and services you are providing off into off-site data centres – even harnessing existing cloud infrastructures, if supported – so that you transparently respond to load conditions. You can have a smaller data centre for day-to-day operations, confident that if you need more processing power for a few hours, you can quickly and seamlessly hire it and pay for just what you use.

It’s a hard concept to get your head around, but once you do, you realise it is a powerful notion:

1. Here is my application stack consisting of web, application and database components
2. I am committed to this set of parameters in terms of SLA: do not let any of it fail; I need 99.999% uptime on the DB, 99.95% on the app; never move data outside of the EU
3. I’m off for a coffee now

If it works like that – and it’s a big “if” – it radically changes the way we think about building out infrastructure and using clouds. Right now I’m building three applications currently hard-coded to Amazon’s AWS due for launch within weeks. I’m now convinced I will need to refactor all of that code within six months. I also realise that the cool tools I’ve been building on to automatically respond to high-load periods are on the verge of being made redundant.

But there are downsides to vSphere. Big ones, too.

Firstly, see how they talk about “standards”? As Larry Dignan points out briefly in his analysis, there aren’t any standards. We’re in a whole new World here, and we’re starting from scratch. It could take 2-3 years for open protocols and standards to emerge with enough software being “cloud-aware” using them to make all this a reality.

Secondly, this is VMware, so make sure you bring money.

In fact, to get started with the “Standard” edition of vSphere you need to come to the party with $795 per CPU. That is not a typo. Got a quad-CPU machine you want to add to the cloud? Yup, you can get started for just $3,180. Got 200 of those machines in your data centre? That’ll be $636,000 please. What’s that you say? You need the “Enterprise Plus” edition for “Tier 1 applications”? Ah, that’s $3,495 per CPU, so for that data centre make your cheque out for just short of $2.8m please… thank goodness they aren’t pricing per core!

When VMware realise that the power of the cloud is with the small guy sat at home building an app that could scale beyond his wildest dreams but who needs to get started cheaply, that’s when this thing will take off. Until then, it’s just a beautiful idea at an ugly price point – and for the majority of web developers out there, that’s as good as making it a complete and total irrelevance. Shame.

I am truly amazed at the story the WSJ ran today suggesting that there are more people making money blogging than programming in America today. From the article:

When you think about it for a moment, this is insane. I don’t know how they are calculating their figure as there is no “blogger” row in the table they cite, but assuming it’s true It means that there are literally 452,000 people out there making a living (at least partially) from affiliate programmes, advertising and selling information products. Four hundred and fifty two thousand.

Maybe I’ve seen so many bubbles over the years that I’m now cynical of large numbers, that seems an awfully large number. What’s more, it’s no surprise that this content with its sensationalist, highly-segmented and tailored tone is taking readers away from newspapers. I’ve discussed before the problems of newspapers and I don’t wish to discuss them again just yet, but the WSJ does ask some interesting questions about this new breed of content producers:

“While many bloggers probably support unionization in general, they have no union of their own. Most have no benefits, yet they work long hours in front of computer screens which could cause a variety of health ailments. And the owners of the big sites most often pay their bloggers as freelancers, avoiding all of those taxes and benefits that newspapers have to pay for their writers.

For now, bloggers say they are overwhelmingly happy in their work, reporting high job satisfaction. But what happens if they, too, lose work; are they covered by unemployment insurance if tastes change and their sites go under? Are they considered journalists under shield laws? Are they subject to libel suits? Are there any limits to the opinions they churn out, or any standards to rein them in? Is there someone to complain to about false blogs or hidden conflicts? At the recent Consumer Electronics Show, Panasonic outfitted bloggers with free Panasonic equipment; did that affect their opinions about the companies they wrote about? There are more questions than answers about America’s Newest Profession.”

I feel that as newspapers submerge into the quagmire of their own making, the trained journalists they release will emerge on their own two feet and find a way to take some of the earnings pie out there for themselves, whilst also addressing these issues. There are plenty of models on the horizon for individuals or small teams of journalists to be able to produce the content we need, get paid well for it and in a work setting that protects them, and all without the flabby masses of managers who don’t understand this new model of the World.

Interesting times we live in, eh?

You heard then?

This is one of those deals where all and sundry outside of the industry ask “Who is buying who? What now?”, whilst those inside the industry faint with disbelief, anger or joy.

To the man in the street this story could be headlined “Supplier of over-priced RDBMS and related services purchases supplier of over-priced hardware and services”. Most people have never seen a Sun computer or had to install or manage an Oracle database. They might have heard of these companies, but don’t know what they do. Somebody once asked me if IBM was still trading – if IBM is thought of like that, imagine what this duo’s impact on the masses is.

Except every time you deal with your bank, your utility companies, pay by debit or credit card in a shop, use your mobile phone or apply for Government benefits, you are using Oracle and Sun technology somewhere along the way. Almost every single time.

The conspiracy theorists of the last 15 years have pointed their finger at Microsoft and screamed “monopoly” every time they could. Microsoft’s deployed technology is almost an irrelevance now. Everything from J2ME on your phone and MySQL behind your Wordpress site, all the way through to your HR department and bank IT systems are now all under one technology roof.

Is this a good thing? Is this something we should attempt to stop? Truth is, I really don’t know. Neither does anybody else. I seem to be one of the few people thinking about it like that.

Right now most people are worried that this will kill off MySQL but that isn’t going to happen. A few with heads in the sand argue this changes nothing. A very small body of people are just glad they can breathe easy now and wash their hands of a problem child.

In other words, people’s fears are likely unfounded, their denials are silly and a few people got out of a stock position they were glad to be out of.

And now all this technology is sat there under one management structure. What will they do with it? Will it flourish? Will it flounder? History suggests this is likely to be an awful deal for all concerned with innovation and a great deal for shareholders. Time will tell.

It’s been just under a full day since the survey went up and I asked you all to give up 10 minutes to let me know what I can do to serve you better. Response is steady and trends are starting to emerge albeit still with rather large confidence intervals (i.e. not enough responses to bet the bank on yet).

What interests me about the results so far is that there are clearly distinct groups who all perceive Vagueware differently. Clients/Ex-clients see Vagueware as one entity, blog readers/twitter followers see it as something completely different, and then there is my own perception which doesn’t quite align with either. That is of course entirely my own fault; I don’t have a marketing plan so much as a “turn up and be charismatic and see what people ask me to do” plan.

The two areas there appears to be most appetite for at the moment are innovation and analysis. Whilst there is some interest in B2B and B2C services (which is what I’ve been focusing on internally for the last couple of months), most of you just don’t care about my plans for World domination.

However even those who have expressed an interest in SaaS products are bullish about innovation, creative thinking and analysis of the industry. Maybe I could combine all of these, time will tell.

I really do value this feedback and it will be critical to how I shape the business in coming weeks or months, so if you want me to do something to help you more effectively, cheaper or in a more directed manner, now is your chance to speak.

And thanks to all who have participated so far (apart from the Company Secretary who is merely childish – “Monkey Tennis” anyone?), you’re all awesome.

As you might have been able to guess, I’ve been doing some house-keeping and re-organising of the business in recent weeks. Now it’s time to take a slightly more holistic approach.

I’m planning to give this blog, the twitter feed and the general service offerings of Vagueware a Spring clean over the coming weeks and it would be invaluable to have your input.

So, would you mind just spending 10 minutes of your valuable time letting me know what you think? I can’t wait to see your responses – especially as I don’t know many of the subscribers to this blog’s RSS feed.

Honestly, 8 question, 10 minutes max, you help me shape my business for the next year and beyond, give it a whirl

Many moons ago I worked in the world of ISP systems administration. That broadly meant I had to be intimately familiar with the inner workings of mail, DNS and Radius servers (the latter still gives me cold shivers when I think back), as well as connectivity issues. Back then, broadband but was a distant dream but thanks to my knowledge of AAA protocols – Authentication, Authorisation & Accounting – I gradually had to become familiar with modem racks and being able to diagnose a problem purely by listening to the screeching noise of a 56K modem negotiating with its telephone-connected partner.

Since then, I have gradually moved away from all that jazz and more into development. Occasionally I pop my head back into that market and see where things are, and am constantly surprised how stagnant the market is. It’s still at a place where it expects people to know much more than they probably want to, just to get started.

And I still remain surprised at how bad support offerings are around connectivity, especially for SoHo customers. Business users pay a premium for their broadband, but still have to spend either a lot of time learning how to configure routers, or pay over-inflated support contracts for others to do it for them.

Add into the mix the growing area of cloud services like EC2 and its competitors and things get more complex. Setting up and managing cloud services so that they automatically scale and adapt to your application’s needs (burstable needs, even), is complex and expensive. There is the inkling of an idea within me to build toolkits that would dramatically reduce the pain of moving to cloud services and managing/supporting burst-tolerant applications.

The issue for me is, do I work on any of these ideas? Some of them are labour intensive, but clearly ideas I can easily recruit people into once a critical mass of customers are on board. There are also other ideas kicking around the Vagueware workshop and I’m sure many of you who know me can think of areas I should be working in that I’m not.

So, I’ve decided to kick the tires of UserVoice, a competitor (considerably more polished) than the toolkit I had here at vagueware.com for a number of years.

In the Services & Products Forum I’ve seeded half a dozen things I could be working on right now, but for various reasons are mostly on hold. I want you, dear reader, to vote on the ones you like. Even better, I want you to suggest ideas that if popular will benefit from dedicated resource – time, cash and sleepless nights – to bring them to fruition. It’s a little like how I started all those years ago, but far more organised.

Once some of the products and services I’m working on right now get launched, they will benefit from their own forums as well. Watch this space, etc.

I have had an awful lot on my plate recently. I think most of us in this sector have.

Right now, I have a few choices to make about what Vagueware does and is involved in over the next 9 months, and I feel the time is ripe for some minor re-invention.

Over the last 15 years I have worked on everything from server administration to strategy, development to training, project management to debugging. One of the reasons Vagueware has struggled to grow at the rate it should have is because I’ve not really chosen one small area and really focused on it. I’ve had my fingers in many, many pies.

It is through being over-committed to so many projects and concerns that has led to me being exhausted and the quality of my work being deeply unsatisfying to myself.

That needs to change, and indeed it already is. I am now moving away from client work and towards internal product development (including a joint venture I’m itching to tell you about, but it’s too early yet), but I’m worried I’ve missed a trick and there is something out there that it’s “obvious” I should be working on but I’m not aware of. You have no idea how often people will start a conversation with me with the phrase “I’m amazed you’re not working on…” and on consideration, I’m usually surprised too.

So, this is last call for input. If there is something you think I should be working on, whether it be a product area you’re surprised I haven’t got stuck into, your own project you think I can help on, or just an interesting idea, speak now (via email or twitter please) or forever hold your peace. If you want to hire me for a project you have until Monday to start the discussion, but after that all client work is being put on hold.

It’s about to go dark on the client front and Kagtum development (amongst others) is going to gear up to a whole new level. See you on the other side.