I’m in good company
A week or so ago I posted an amusing picture, supposedly from Popular Mechanics. Well it was quickly debunked as a hoax. This morning, this, showing that I am in good company!
BlogBridge interview
Yesterday I was interviewed about BlogBridge by ClientJava.com, a very useful Web site for us Java desktop developers. Check it out..
In the comment section I was asked to elaborate on my provocative statements about Java Web Start. Here's what I said.
[GEEK] Java Web Start
You might think it's a bad idea for me to complain about Java Web Start. Well the truth is that I really like it and so am really frustrated by it's failures. In my own small way I am hoping to wake up someone at Sun to see the importance of this little bit of technology to their grand Java strategy.
In my interview with ClientJava I again made some pointed comments about Java Web Start, and in the comment thread some annonymous person (coward) asked me to elaborate. Here is what I said.
"Why has WebStart been such a disappointment? I've written about this in my blog, here and here.
Basically, the promise of WebStart is great: a cross platform way to deploy, install and update Java based desktop apps. The disappointment is that it comes close to working but then fails in so many different ways. It's a tease.
There is no reliable cross platform way to check and then install a java environment. And then to add insult to injury, there's no user friendly URL to send users to that does it for them. Try looking at www.java.com. It's so sad. Lots of useless and confusing marketing and a little link in the corner to install Java.
Java Web Start is the very first experience my users get with BlogBridge. And it is the #1 cause for problems. I would say about 10% attempts don't work. People will only give an app like BlogBridge one chance so those are all lost sales. If you are really technical, you might be able to fight your way through and figure out how to install the jre or re-install it because it was corrupted.
Even when it works it does absurd things like telling the user that installation is strongly discouraged if there is no digital signature. This might sound like it makes sense but if you really think about it, a digital signature from BlogBridge Inc. would add no confidence whatsoever to the user that bad things wouldn't happen. All I need is $300 for a certificate and a postal address.
And there are lots more reasons. The thing that is hard to understand is why Sun doesn't see that if you want Java to take hold on the desktop, solving this problem, really solving it, is more important than probably any of the improvements in 1.5. And the only way to solve it is to have hard-core experts in each platform (Windows in all its flavors, Mac in all its flavors, Unix in all its flavors) building the solution. Becuase a working solution will be very difficult to build. But it is the keys to the kingdom IMHO. "
What’s the world coming to?
Someone just pointed me to this item on Mike Zellers
blog, under the title,
"best explanation of election i can think of…." Just having taken a short
Photoshop course and wanting to test my newly found chops, here's a little
something I cooked
up:
Disclaimer: I don't know Mike Zellers and his photograph is most likely totally legitimate. Not that my fake would fool anyone.
Amusing
There's an amusing new blog I came across: "Gapingvoid", by Hugh Macleod. He's a cartoonist, and his postings often have a quickly sketched amusing drawing.
I caught today's posting with this quote on it:
_' "I can't take this shit anymore!" He said, mistakenly' _
Amusing.
From "Waiting for Godot":
ESTRAGON: I can 't go on like this.
VLADIMIR: That's what you think.More amusing.
Is this a good idea?
I never was a fan of Tommy Thomson - what a name! I am no expert on terrorism, but it seems to me that saying this in his goodbye speech can't be a very good idea:
"For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply because it is so easy to do," Thompson said as announced his departure before department employees. "We are importing a lot of food from the Middle East, and it would be easy to tamper with that."
For the life of me, I can't understand why he'd let himself be quoting saying that!
Why Improv didn’t succeed, Part Deux
Seems like a dredged up some "old" (you know who you are) Improv fans with my earlier posting, so I thought an additional comment or two might be in order.
First off, lest it be misunderstood , in no way do I feel anything but totally proud about Imrpov as a concept and a product. I hope it is not inconsistent to feel that way, and yet agree that for a variety of reason it was not successful, as a product.
The concept of an alternative (not replacement) for a spreadsheet for real financial modeling is, I think, quite sound. (Yes, I can do page layout in Microsoft Word, but if that's my purpose, PageMaker is better. You could make an analogous point about PowerPoint and PhotoShop.)
By the same token , if what one is building a real financial model (i.e. a business plan or an integrated set of financial statements) then a product like Improv would be far superior. I say like Improv, because that was over 10 years ago, and it certainly had room for improvement at the time.
I received an email from Peter Murray, CTO of a company called Quantrix. They have created a new application called Quantrix Modeler in the spirit of Improv, which has continued to improve and http://www.quantrix.com/r-section-2.phpthe model. Here is what Peter said of my posting [slightly edited for length]:
Dear Pito,
I was interested to read your response to Adam Bosworth's talk @ ICSOC'04.
The Improv model is not "ancient history" yet! At Quantrix, we believe there is significant value in the Improv inspired approach to building complex models - and our customers are proving that out. There is no question that the free-form two-dimensional-grid based approach is useful in many cases. However, as soon as the calculation begins to get complex or the model is utilized through time in many iterations, our customers find that Quantrix is a more powerful tool.
Our theory on the reasons for the demise of Improv follow more the line of thinking in your final paragraph, rather than the idea that the product is somehow inherently flawed:
1) Lotus was positioning Improv as a spreadsheet replacement, rather than a specialized tool to better perform an important subset of tasks currently performed with a spreadsheet.
2) Lotus was in the throes of a heroic battle for survival against Microsoft's Excel - causing undue pressure on the company to make its product portfolio clean and understandable, and to organize all resources behind the flagship product. Introducing new technology costs in a scenario such as that.
Quantrix is employing a patient approach which identifies niches where the pain on traditional tools is great and the relief from a more scalable, transparent solution is palpable. As we progress, we are listening to users and building in new / better functionality - and thus making the product more attractive to a larger audience. In fact, we have folks from all kinds of disciplines who have sought out an alternative solution to the traditional spreadsheet - financial planning / budgeting professionals, equity analysts, business consultants as well as engineers, scientists and policy researchers. We even have customers working on genome analysis with Quantrix.
So, rather than ancient history, we prefer to think that - in this case - "what's old is new again".
[…]
Sincerely,
pete
And just to close the loop, here is what I responded:
Overall, I agree with that analysis.
Of course, I would hope that the Improv model wasn't ancient history! I was referring to the particulars of my experience at Lotus. I can be critical of people who live in the past and relive long past experiences so I am always careful of that myself. That is a totally closed chapter for me and I wouldn't have even thought of it until I read Adam's story. My feeling was that at a very high level he was hitting the nail on the head.
The notion of something being "inherently fatally flawed" seems relative to me when applied to a product. For example, if I tell you I have designed a great new televeision but I don't include a screen, well it's fatally flawed. But if I told you the same thing was a radio, well, you see where I am going 🙂
Predicting the future is hard
_" Scientists at the RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a "home computer" could look like in the year 2004. However the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work, but 50 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve these problem.
With teletype interface and the Fortran language, the computer will be easy to use" _
[From 1954 Popular Mechanics Magazine, from Peter Grossman]
Late breaking news: the whole thing is an urban legend. No such photograph ever appeared in Popular Mechanics. Thanks Peter and Larry for helping me preserve my journalistic integrity.You can read all about it on the wonderful Snopes site. The big steering wheel should have been the tip-off.
Adam Bosworth on KISS
Adam Bosworth's an interesting guy, and very smart, and has been deeply involved in web services and many related technologies for years. He really knows this stuff. And it's interesting, because one of the key Web Services technologies is SOAP, a loosely coupled, "webbish" way of doing remote procedure calls.
[Aside #1 : If you feel your eyelids getting heavy around now, I appologize for not labeling this entry as "GEEK" but I thought it was border line]
[Aside #2 : I wonder whether the term "Web Services" is now dated, and what the more au courant term is. Perhaps "service oriented architecture". If so, please accept my appologies for not being fully PC]
[Aside #3 : I see that Aside #1 and #2 are both appologies. I should have labeled them Applogogy #1 and #2. I appologize.]
Anyway, if you've followed SOAP and the related and simpler standard known as XML-RPC you will have noticed a big difference, particularly in the degree of complexity in each scheme. And by the way, SOAP has spawned a whole series of related formats or standards, one more complicated than the one before it.
Anyway, Adam Bosworth, closely connected to the origins of SOAP, in this speech gives an empassioned plea for what we know as the "KISS" principle. Where I went to school, KISS stood for "Keep it Simple Stupid" (yes, I didn't get out much 🙂 but Adam Bosworth uses to mean Keep it Simple and Sloppy.
This argument about how simple is too simple is an important (and not new) one in our field. Adam Bosworth's article is a good piece because it collects together many of the traditional points as well as clever phrases which are used in this debate which we see in our field in many different guises, and it makes you think.
I don't have the answer or really a clear opinion. You can rattle off standards / protocols / formats / languages which are easy to understand (for example RSS 2.0) and explain and those which are thoroughly inscrutable and confusing (for example XML Encryption.)
I could cite a dozen other examples , but I won't.
When I say I don't really have an answer or clear opinion, here's the reason.
When I read something like the XML Encryption standard, I get totally lost. My default conclusion is that it's just over my head, and whoever designed it understood the the subject matter better than I, and I just am thankful for good libraries to call. But on the other hand, I have seen plenty of examples of totally overengineered systems and architectures to know that unnecessary complexity is definitely a disease that inflicts us in this field.
So I am not ready to say one way or the other that simpler is always better, or that one approach (for example SOAP) is clearly inferior to another one (for example XML-RPC.) Adam Bosworth's piece won't answer this question, but it is thought provoking (as you can see, because it provoked me to write this little piece)
Why Improv didn’t succeed
It's been a while.
Which is why my heart beat just a little faster when I read a reference to Improv (not altogether flattering) in the Adam Bossworth piece I just wrote about, where he said:
_
Consider thespreadsheet. It is a protean, sloppy, plastic, flexible medium that is, ironically, the despair of all accountants and auditors because it is virtually impossible to reliably understand a truly complex and rich spreadsheet.Lotus corporation (now IBM), filled with Harvard MBA 's and PhD's in CS from MIT, built Improv. Improv set out "to fix all this". It was an auditors dream. It provided rarified heights of abstraction, formalisms for rows and columns, and in short was truly comprehensible. It failed utterly , not because it failed in its ambitions but because it succeeded._
I happen to know a little bit about this 🙂 I was the guy , for better or worse, who came up with the idea for Improv and got it built and shipped at Lotus.
Let me start by saying I have neither a PhD nor an MBA (and proud of it!) And I am almost positive there was not a single one of those on the Improv team. But other than that, Adam makes I think an important and accurate observation.
This is so many years ago now so I don't think about it much anymore. But at one point I was often asked and thought about what happened with Improv and why it failed. And while I had more complicated answers at the time, I have to say that there is a lot to what Adam says.
It's easy to get all philosophical about what makes a spreadsheet a spreadsheet, what it's core essence is. And I have. It's hard to argue that one of the keys is the maleability of the spreadsheet as a medium. The fact that a spreadsheet can grow organically, be modified and grown in a kind of an Improvisational manner. But when spreadsheets get complicated they get messy and error-prone and this is what Improv set out to address.
In the end it didn't go anywhere, probably because in setting out to improve on spreadsheets, Improv lost the essence of a spreadsheet and in doing so lost the market.
Innovators Dilemma
There is an interesting Innovators Dilemma kind of perspective here, referring to the now-classic book "The Innovators Dilemma" by Clayton M. Christensen. To summarize one of the key theses of the book extremely briefly:
that a new technology might initially have a fatal flaw which makes it unsuitable for the purpose it was intended for. (For example, Electric cars don't have the range or speed to meet the needs of today's drivers.)
An established maker of cars (e.g. Ford) has a strong disincentive to invest in Electric cars because it doesn't meet the need of it's existing customer base.
An upstart competitor could identify a different market where the apparent flaws (speed and range) are actually 'features' not 'bugs' (for example a car specifically made for very young drivers) and use that market as a spring board to be able to perfect the technology.
Eventually the upstart has years of experience with the new technology (the batteries and drive train) and improves it to the point where it actually does meet the need of mainstream customers, while the established player has been ignoring things and gets unseated.
I am not sure it applies, but one could argue a parallel here with Improv. In particular this would lead you to the conclusion that the key strategy mistake was to try to market Improv to the existing spreadsheet market. Instead, if the product were marketed to a segment where the more structured model was a 'feature' not a 'bug' would have given Lotus the time to learn and improve and refine the model to a point where it would have satisfied the larger market as well.
Who knows. Ancient history.