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	Wednesday, February 19, 2003

This post (and this weblog) has a new home. Keeping Our Feet on the Ground Phil Wainwright had some nice quips in "Boom to bust and back again" on the LooselyCoupled.com blog: It's not a market, it's a mechanism: "There is no natural market for the technology alone." It takes a visionary technical manager to connect the possibilities of a technology with the needs of a business, and the coincidence of real vision, business need, and budget is too rare to build a business on. The art of selling technology is eliciting (or having advance knowledge of) a customer's business needs and then choosing the right technology.  Both technology vendors and customers would be better off if customers made fewer a priori technology decisions and vendors asked more questions. It's not a quick fix for problem software: "Using it to plaster over structural problems in older software may seem to work for a while, but it just defers the day of reckoning." I'll take a plunge and comment before I read Phil's article. Bad software is bad software, and wrappering won't improve it under any circumstances.  Nonetheless, I see wrappering old or bad software in asynchronous web services - i.e., loose coupling - as a mechanism for improving the overall reliability of composite applications. (A very reasonable example would be wrapping a .NET webservice around the MSWord object instead of getting at it through JNI or through VBScript with BSF.) Don't trust anything you hear from the big vendors: "IBM, Microsoft, Sun and the others ... are fighting a desperate battle to defend their existing market positions in the face of hugely unpredictable and disruptive forces for change." I'm not sure that small vendors are exactly trustworthy, either, but at least they're also not capable of steamrolling customers with marketing. My sincere hope is that some of the genuinely good ideas in web services and service-oriented architecture don't get lost somewhere in the salvos of hype and anti-hype. 9:13:31 AM