Donald Ferguson: Simplify
by Volker Weber
BBC: What's the biggest technology mistake you ever made - either at work or in your own life?
Fergusson: When I was at IBM, I started a product called Websphere ... Because I had come from working on big mission-critical systems, I thought it needs to be scalable, reliable, have a single point of control ... It was too complex for people to master. I overdesigned it.
Comments
Fascinating. You have to wonder about IBM's reward systems. Ferguson rode the Websphere wave all the way up the promotion ladder to IBM Fellow.
I'm not sure what his new company is actually doing - could it be that Websphere is a computing product for him now?
Wie sagte mal ein Kollege so schön: "Jedes Ökosystem hat seinen Aasfresser."
I think it's important to understand IBM's historic software development philosophy (into which Websphere fits), which I would paraphrase as follows:
Build software to meet the most complex requirements of the very largest organizations, and then scale it down to satisfy the needs of smaller organizations with simpler requirements.
This is in contrast to the scale up development model now employed by much of the rest of the software industry (and the open source community).
The problem with IBM's approach is that it is often difficult (impossible?) to drive out the complexity that was acceptable to its initial customers, and thus, satisfy the needs of smaller organizations with simpler requirements.
At one time one could argue that the scale up model had an inverse set of problems, but both "Moore's Law" and low-cost, horizontal scalability, have tended to allow solutions that work at sufficient scale without having to add complexity.
The interesting question, is in what direction iis IBM heading? Their recent advertisement touting 6,000,000 lines of code written to speed the handling of baggage at Schiphol tends to argue that little has changed.
Maybe the sadest facet of the story: Over years, Websphere has been draining resources (development & marketing) that Lotus needed so urgently.
I wonder what Steve Mills would have to say ;-)
It's 3,000,000 lines of code, and here is the url
I jumped into the WebSphere world ten years ago and to be perectly honest it's served me very very wel career wise. I've profited from Fergusson's "mistake"
Although if I ever meet the person who designed the gui / console I'll punch them in the face. (focus? what's that?)
Interesting last sentence: "Because we were IBM, we survived it, but if we'd been a start-up, we'd have gone to the wall."
