New dimensions in system design

The technology environment is changing. The change is significant, affecting the basic dimensions with which we measure systems.

The center of the old technology world was Windows. Manufacturers built PCs to run Windows. Suppliers built software to run on Windows. Systems were local -- that is, they ran in a single location. Before the internet era, everything lived in your data center. Even with the internet, systems ran in a single data center. (Or possibly two, for redundancy.)

With everything in one data center,  

The age of "Windows as the center of the universe" has passed. Today, we have multiple environments. The simple universe of one technology has been replaced by a universe of multiple galaxies.

Today, systems that are spread across multiple hardware installations. Systems consist of one (or several) front end "user clients", possibly for the iPhone, Android phones, and web browsers. The back end consists of not one but many cooperative services, each handling a small portion of the work. These can include web servers, database servers, queue managers, and content distribution networks.

But the change is larger than that. The set of basic elements is changing. In the old world, systems were built from a database, access, and programs written in a specified language. Those "dimensions" of the application defined its "space" in the data center. Vendors were defined by how well they met the needs of the organization in those dimensions.

In the new world, systems are more complex. Instead of a single database, a system may use several. Instead of a single web server, an application may use multiple, depending on the transaction being processed. We use virtualized processors to host servers, and cloud computing to manage the virtualized servers. We no longer think of a system as "a Java application"; we think of it as "a Java, Javascript, SQL, NoSQL, message queues, and some HTML and CSS" system.

In such a complex world, we design our systems with a new collection of "building blocks", and we look for vendors to provide those building blocks. Those elements of system design are: hardware, software, content, and services. These are the dimensions for system architecture and vendor offerings.
Let's look at the big providers:

Microsoft clearly supplies software: Windows, Office, Visual Studio, and many other packages. They are getting into the hardware game. Microsoft has offered hardware for years, in the form of the Microsoft Mouse, the Microsoft Keyboard, and today with the XBOX, the Kinect, and the Surface. They also offer cloud services and content (music, books, and movies).

Google offers some hardware (the Nexus phones and tablets) but also works with manufacturers. They offer the Chromebook hardware that runs their Chrome browser. They offer cloud services. They have also gotten into the music and video markets, with Google play and YouTube.

Amazon.com offers hardware, but only the the form of the Kindle. They do not offer PCs or phones. They have a rich offering of services with their cloud systems.

Apple offers hardware, software, content, and little in the way of cloud services. Their MacBooks and iPads (and the operating systems) are respected by all. They provide content in the form of music, movies, books, and newspaper subscriptions. Yet their focus is on consumers, not the enterprise. This is clear in their iCloud offerings, which are designed for individuals.

In this light of hardware, software, services, and content, the other "big names" of the tech world are lacking:

Barnes and Noble offers hardware (Nook tablets and e-readers) and the software to run them, but nothing for development or the office. They offer content but not services.

IBM offers hardware and software but not content. They don't sell books or music. They offer cloud services, in addition to their old-school consulting services.

Facebook offers services and content, but not hardware and software. (This is why the rumor of a Facebook phone keeps returning.) Facebook uses cloud computing for their servers but doesn't offer it to customers. They offer other services, such as a platform for games and an authentication service for web site log-ins.

Yahoo offers services and some (limited) content but not hardware or software.

I'm not claiming that a vendor needs all four of these components to be profitable. IBM and Yahoo are doing rather well. (Barnes and Noble not so much, but that is a problem specific to their market.) But the presence (or absence) of these four components is important, and decides how a vendor can assist a client.

The new dimensions of hardware, software, services, and content affect hiring organizations too. Systems will need all of these components (to one degree or another) to satisfy a customer's needs. When looking for solutions from vendors, and when looking to hire, companies will have to weigh the strengths of the vendor (or the candidate) in all of these areas.
The smart, big vendors are offering all services. The smart, small vendors will offer a carefully selected subset and ensure that they can provide quality. The same goes for candidates. The heavyweights will have expertise in all areas, the middleweights light expertise in all and strength in a few, and the lightweights will be capable in one or two.

The task for vendors (and candidates) is to build their skills along these dimensions, and present them to clients.

The Nixon of programming languages

Do we need a language to kick around?

It seems that we do. From the earliest days of computing, people have been critical of specific programming languages.

Those who had learned machine language and assembly code were skeptics of FORTRAN and horrified at the output of the COBOL compiler.

When I joined the field, BASIC, Pascal, and C were in the ascendant, yet each had their fans. In the microcomputer arena, BASIC was dominant and thus admired by many and despised by many (with some folks living in both camps). Pascal and C had their followers, and there were other languages for the explorers (CBASIC and Forth). The clear winner in the "most despised" race was BASIC.

In the golden age of Microsoft Windows, the dominant languages were Pascal (briefly), followed by C, and then a tussle between Visual Basic and C++. Both Visual Basic and C++ were liked and disliked, with strong loyalties.

Sun and Microsoft introduced Java and C#, which pulled people away from the Visual Basic and C++ arena and into a new, complex dispute. The argument of language superiority was clouded by the assets of the run-time system and the backing vendor. To this day, people have strong preferences for one over the other.

Today we see discussions, with new languages Scala, Clojure, and Lua compared to Python, Ruby, and Java. But these discussions are less heated and more educational. They are civilized discourse.

My theory is that we use languages as a proxy for independence, and our arguments are not about language or compiler but about our ability to survive. Using FORTRAN or COBOL meant committing to IBM (despite the portability of the languages), and people feared IBM.

In the microcomputer age, programming in BASIC meant committing to Microsoft, but the relationship was complex. Microsoft owned the language, but Digital Research owned CP/M (the de facto standard operating system), so we had two brutes to fear.

Now that Oracle has purchased Sun and acquired Java, I expect the Java/C# disputes to increase. Sun was the rebel alliance against the imperial Microsoft, but Oracle is a second empire. Both can threaten the independence of smaller organizations.

I also expect that more people will be kicking Java. Those who want independence will look at newer languages; those who want security will look to Java or C#. It may be a imagined security, since the vendor can pull the syntactical rug out from under your project at any time; consider changes in Visual Basic over time.

The new languages have no large empire behind them. (Yes, Scala and Clojure live in the Java run-time, but they are not viewed as tools of the empire.) With no bogeyman behind them, there is little reason to castigate them. They have little power over us.

It is the power of large vendors that we fear. So yes, as long as we have large vendors backing languages, there will be languages to kick around.