My predictions » Cloud http://www.craigekerstiens.com My thoughts and predictions on technology and business, and sometimes strong ones at that Sun, 29 Aug 2010 17:39:05 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Web, Scalability, SAAS http://www.craigekerstiens.com/web-scalability-saas/ http://www.craigekerstiens.com/web-scalability-saas/#comments Fri, 16 May 2008 19:46:45 +0000 Craig http://craigekerstiens.com/blog/?p=10

I was having a conversation a few days ago with someone and we were back and forth about software development within the enterprise and startups/web companies. The point kept going back and forth of how facebook/google/amazon doesn’t really apply to enterprise software development. His primary point was that none of these sites really have a deep feature list. While they’re able to handle scalability well, it’s not the same as supporting a variety of features.

At the time one startup that would be a prime example of what I’m about to detail did not come to mind. Salesforce, salesforce has a respectable feature list, yet is also one of the web companies that has managed to scale well. The interesting thing about web companies is the best ones are the ones that can truly scale to a mass audience. Many can offer an okay service, but scaling that service is a truly difficult task.

Many would argue that extensive testing and rigorous QA will help to offer enterprise quality software. But to this note I very strongly disagree, in coming years we are going to see more and more of a facebook model. Facebook as they develop code they test against live data, it will be the individuals that coded and perhaps a few others, but is really not much more than a smoke test to make sure things are still working. They then role out the new code and when things break they are ready to fix them. Why does this work? Why are users okay with the site being down at times? Well personally I will settle for more features at a few inconveniences most days of the week. Seldom is software 100% solid, I have even seen bugs in notepad, so as a result you cannot expect software to be perfect.

Instead with a SAAS, software as a service, model you do not have to worry about software updates. You simple update the site or service, and then you can role out these features more rapidly. Instead of office being a 2-3 year large product update, you push new features to the site at a weekly basis. You also alleviate some of your burden of supporting a variety of installations and versions of your product.

Because of these points it’s more important that we pay attention to these companies that have gotten scalability right. The facebook’s, google’s, amazon’s of the world that can handle millions of hits per second, once enterprises have a firm understanding of this, they can attempt to them build their feature set within a SAAS model. When we get to this point features will be built in faster and software will begin to grow faster than in previous years.

]]> http://www.craigekerstiens.com/web-scalability-saas/feed/ 0 Adobe AIR is a game changer, if people would build for it… http://www.craigekerstiens.com/adobe-air-is-a-game-changer-if-people-would-build-for-it/ http://www.craigekerstiens.com/adobe-air-is-a-game-changer-if-people-would-build-for-it/#comments Thu, 08 May 2008 16:46:00 +0000 Craig http://craigekerstiens.com/blog/?p=7

Spend five minutes talking to me about technology or business and you’ll quickly realize I’m a fan of Adobe AIR. Adobe has done a very good job building a cross-platform runtime, and providing tools that make the transition from the web to the desktop quite minimal.

First to elaborate why I like AIR. For one I’m a fan of web 2.0, the sites feel cleaner, smoother, and drive new capabilities. Versus most desktop applications that are starting to feel old, and much like 1990′s Java Applets do on the web. With Flex Builder, which is an IDE for developing for flash and/or AIR, I can develop a sweet website, but then quickly port it to the desktop while maintaining a rich web 2.0 feel.

Second, did I mention it’s cross-platform? Windows, OSX, Linux, the application in AIR will look/feel/function the same. So what? This could have been done other ways right? Well here is where I start to place my bets, no one else has really done anything in this area as well as Adobe so far. Also Adobe has made their long term strategy clear, they want to truly become a cross-platform runtime. If you’re thinking what other platforms right now, you’re not thinking large enough. They want AIR to support mobile phones, set-top boxes, likely even gaming consoles. This means I can look at one application on multiple mediums with an either identical look, of very similar one, with minimal development efforts. This allows a developer to then focus even further on improving functionality.

Finally, a bit of a rant. Adobe AIR does not have a true competitor, Silverlight is a competitor to flash (not AIR), Google Gears might be the closest thing to it. But, with regard to gears taking a website and making it available offline isn’t all AIR can do. AIR has local file access, local access to some devices, which when you’re still within a browser you can’t do. Oh, and one feature I personally just like is the auto-update ability of applications.

So….. If it’s so great, why haven’t you heard of it and why aren’t you using it? Well the single problem seems to be people building applications on it. I’ve seen very few applications that would appeal to mainstream users. I (being an avid fan of AIR and anything web 2.0), will typically use 2 AIR applications per day. One being twhirl, which I use as my primary twitter client. The other tends to vary by needs. However this is contrasted with about 20 applications that I work in over a given day. Most AIR applications thus far are simple, one-off fun applications. Perhaps to really make some penetration there should be some of the following:

  • Financial/Stock tool that takes advantage of Adobe’s charting abilities
  • Word Application
  • Spreadsheet Editor
  • Central social networking aggregator (Think one stop stop to view and update all web 2.0 networks)
  • Email client
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