Monday, June 23, 2003

Operator Friendly I've been doing a lot of work with two IBM products over the past couple of weeks, WebSphere Portal Server (WPS) and WebSphere Studio Application Developer (WSAD), and it strikes me how very different these products are in terms of their ease of use. It amazes me that they actually come from the same company. Then again, maybe I know the source of their divergence... First, let me explain what I mean. WPS took me two full days just to install, including all of the pre and co-requisites. The install process was fraught with pitfalls, and I had to uninstall and reinstall several times, manually updating my Windows registry, searching out obscure fixpacks on IBM's FTP site, and sorting through four different documents that explained the installation steps (different steps in each, by the way, and none of them completely correct). Once I was up and running, I ran into further configuration issues for the following two days. What is truly astounding is that this is, by far, the leading portal server on the market. In all fairness, once it is up and running, it is relatively easy to use, but getting it running is a horrendous experience. I have heard that IBM's own technical reps do not install it, but rather send their laptops to support to have it done. I wish I could have. Now, installing WSAD was like a dream. The product installs its own application server environment, sets up its libraries, and allows you to include a bunch of detailed examples, each very self-contained. Never did I have to go elsewhere to get anything. It was the perfect installation experience. On top of it, the product is extremely operator-friendly. It allows you to view your application from a variety of perspectives, and switch perspectives instantly. It is simple to import libraries, move objects between projects, and even refactor changed code - without ever worrying about classpaths or compilers.  When building web applications, deployment descriptor files and configuration files are automatically generated, and can be viewed and modified through intuitive, structured editors. Best of all, the compiling and packaging is done for you as work through your project, allowing you to focus on writing code. I would have to say that this is the best software product I have ever seen from IBM. (That isn't necessarily saying a lot, because I believe that very few excellent software products have ever come out of IBM. Most of them are very utilitarian - they work well in terms of reliability and speed, but are very difficult to work with. But this product is really good.) So how is it that two products come out of the same development organization and yet they have completely different levels of operator-friendliness? I think there are two reasons for this. First of all, much of WSAD was not created by IBM. It comes from the Eclipse project, which is open source. I think this model works really well for IBM because the open source community is particularly good at the things that IBM is not that good at - primarily, making things easy to use. IBM, conversely, is good at making things that work well and that are stable. The combination produces very nice results. WPS was produced entirely inside of IBM, and you can tell. It works well and is very reliable, but getting it running is no small task. The second reason is that WPS is targeted to a different audience, at least in the minds of IBM. WSAD is made for developers, while WPS is made for IT departments. (I think that IBM is missing the point a bit, because I believe developers ultimately influence these decisions more that they think - but that is a point for another article.) I think that IBM does not put a high priority on operator ease of use because they know that the guys who have to swim through it are not the buyers. That is a bit pessimistic, but I believe it is true. To take my pessimism a step further, I also believe that IBM is intentionally not fixing the problem because it is a source of services revenue for them. What happens is they sell at an executive level - either on the business or on the IT side. They are able to sell there because they are IBM - you are buying the name - nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM (you get the point). The buyer forces WPS on the implementation folks, who quickly determine that this is too hard to use and that they are going to need some help. IBM is happy to step in with gobs of services (read: more revenue). This is what always happens with "Enterprise" products. So maybe IBM will never change when it comes to those high-end product sets. Why make them easier to operate if it only serves to cut revenue from your services? At the opposite extreme is Microsoft. I believe this is precisely why M$FT has continuously beaten the pants off of IBM on anything that the user has to touch. Perhaps as portals get closer to the user, and Microsoft figures out that it needs a real portal play, IBM will be forced to change. If they do, I think they should use the model they used with WSAD, because it really produced a nice result, and for the first time IBM has produced a user-oriented product (in this case the user is the developer) that is competitive with Microsoft in terms of operator-friendliness. 11:39:14 AM