Architecture astronauts take over

http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/05/01.html

by mqt • 18 years ago

131 75 18 years ago

dhouston2• 18 years ago

we beg to differ that sync/sharing isn't a killer app ;)

ivank2• 18 years ago

Well, you guys are actually solving a real problem. Especially since I'm not bored enough to maintain my own real-time backup system. Dropbox is very useful to me, even with just one computer.

johns• 18 years ago

For me and the people I know, sync is a killer app for backups, but not for sharing.

dhouston2• 18 years ago

that's because no one's made it really easy/reliable. our users (esp business users) love the easy folder sharing and many have stopped windows file servers as a result

maximilian• 18 years ago

I wish you guys would include me in the beta! I've been tooling around with JungleDisk which hasn't been working (which sucks!). I'm a grad student so I have a lot of back and forth between school and my computer and I'm always syncing files back and forth through email (which is such a pain!). File syncing is a big deal for me. The fact that you guys do version control sorta by default is awesome. I've been thinking about how you guys do that, and I think I know how, but I'll keep it to myself as you probably wouldn't comment or confirm it anyway. (so nobody steals your thunder).

aston• 18 years ago

Max! You don't have your email in your profile...Shoot us an email.

ejs• 18 years ago

hah i have the same problem, signed up a while ago. Does dropbox work with linux?

glymor• 18 years ago

I don't believe that you and Microsoft are suggesting the same thing at all.

My guess is you want to give everybody what programmers have been able to do for years with distributed VCS, publicly addressable computers and rsync. And presumably want to do it well enough that even programmers who could get it for free wouldn't be able to fool themselves that paying wasn't worth the convenience.

Now what Microsoft is doing is probably connected with there life-logging stuff. MSR has been going on for a while about how we'll never delete anything and every document and every phone call we make etc will be recorded and searchable. The mesh is presumably the infrastructure that all these Windows Mobile devices would use to make this seamless.

However this is insane, there are already more mobiles in Europe than people, and Microsoft can't even keep XBox Live running. Just have the devices query/talk to each other without getting some central server involved.

nostrademons• 18 years ago

I was thinking as I read this that the "syncing" killer app would likely come from an adjacent field, rather than being designed specifically for syncing. Either version control (git) or backup (DropBox)...

muerdeme• 18 years ago

This is laughable to me. I've muttered more obscenities trying to deal with synchronization problems between computers than with anything else I can think of.

I want all of my media everywhere. Is that so wrong?

cellis2• 18 years ago

just remote into your dtop with your lappy. if thats not enough, use SVN.

mtts2• 18 years ago

You and, well, maybe everyone here and, uhm, maybe everybody at reddit and slashdot and then, well, nobody else.

shaunxcode• 18 years ago

Yeah I think its a bit of an odd critique. Sure pie in the sky promises are just that, but it doesn't mean it's always a bad idea. Microsoft bob: bad, online file/data synch: good. Obviously the MS implementation is bound to fail for reasons circling the proprietary-lockin-nonstandard-triangle but the idea itself is killer. I am really digging dropbox for instance.

DaniFong2• 18 years ago

'And dammit foosball doesn't play itself.'

Priceless

cellis2• 18 years ago

Hell no it doesn't.Its a full time job where I work!

watmough2• 18 years ago

That is absolutely vintage Joel. And he's right.

Ray Ozzie and the rest of MS should have realized by now that the only thing that really works is building something. Give us something to criticize. Look at YUI. It's not great in places, but at least it works, and it there, and available to play with, and fun, and cross-platform.

It's coming to something when the most interesting thing out of MS is probably F#, and Photosynth. Aren't these from MSR?

What is the rest of MS doing?

[Personally I'd be glad if they finally got round to fixing all the damn non-resizable dialogs in their apps, which infest all MS software like cockroaches.]

michaelneale• 18 years ago

Simon Peyton-Jones and his work on Haskell is very interesting.

neilc• 18 years ago

He's also at MSR -- the folks at MSR are doing lots of very interesting work.

slackerIII• 18 years ago

It is absolutely vintage joel in that it is a FogCreek recruiting ad. Joel has mastered the art of using fanboyism as marketing. "Oh look -- Microsoft is doing something big! I'm sure it sucks! haha Come work for me"

watmough2• 18 years ago

Speaking of the synchronization problem, Google calendar now syncs faultlessly with Outlook (my version is 2003) which makes both apps significantly more useful to me.

Go interoperability!

maxwell• 18 years ago

The problem with most synchronization systems I've encountered is that they're based on unification -- "one version to rule them all." Unification seems to be an optimization strategy, seen in all kinds of networks, from computer to political. History doesn't suggest it's a very good model in the long run, since it's so fragile. The Bible survived because so many people duplicated it, while all those single manuscripts in Alexandria, however divine, went up in smoke.

Duplication seems to beat unification. Just look at how Wikipedia and Google, writhing seas of duplication, kick the living shit out of closed taxonomies and hierarchal directories. Anand Rajaraman hit the nail on the head with his "more data beats better algorithms" observation, and I'd skew it here as "more copies beats better organization." I want to asynchronize my data, not synchronize it. The tricky part is making this model work at a personal level, across devices and yet not exposed to the world at large. I wouldn't put my money on MSFT figuring it out.

wanorris• 18 years ago

Maybe we just need to put all our data in git or mercurial and forget about all this other nonsense.

ivank2• 18 years ago

I yearn for the day when my cell phone runs git and has a single namespace for my data (including that maximum-length WEP2 key that I've typed into my iPhone twice).

joshwa• 18 years ago

To me the real Architecture Astronauts are the Enterprise Architects, who think that documenting in some 6-figure modeling tool how I order paperclips, and defining a paperclip SOA and sending EVERYTHING over a 8-figure ESB they bought from IBM-- now those are some space cadets!

osipov• 18 years ago

>documenting in some 6-figure modeling tool how I order paperclips

are you suggesting that the execs should go and read the code that some intern wrote in order to figure out how their customers buy paperclips?

iamelgringo• 18 years ago

I actually found the most interesting part of the article towards the end: Joel's really upset that MSFT and GOOG are picking up all the top CS grads, despite Joel's great internships and Aeron chairs. And, he's also upset that the starting salary for a CS grad is now pushing 6 figures.

I'd actually wager that the true cream of the crop is primarily interested in starting their own companies and cashing out early. It's the second tier that are interested in working for MSFT and GOOG. And then, the rest of the companies are fighting for scraps. I could be wrong, I'm not doing the HR thing like Joel is.

And, it's only going to be a matter of time before undergrad salaries across the board start climbing. And once the press starts writing "Tech shortage. Salaries skyrocket!" there will be a lot more people going into CS as a major.

DaniFong2• 18 years ago

In my experience (largely on the CS theory, math, and physics side of things), a large portion of the cream of the crop just wants to do research -- at least coming out of their undergrad, anyway. The numbers change fairly quickly after a few years of grad school.

edw5192• 18 years ago

"there will be a lot more people going into CS as a major"

Sadly, increasing quantity will probably have little impact on increasing quality.

Hexstream4• 18 years ago

I think it will have a big, negative impact on increasing quality.

AndyKelley• 18 years ago

Hey Joel, look at me! I'll come work for you. I'm a young strapping rapscallion, and I made a python script to play ultimate frisbee FOR me!

danielrhodes• 18 years ago

Synchronization is going to be really useful when the majority of applications moves online and there are no files to synchronize anymore. ;-)

Just another example of Microsoft denying the future. If they could sue the Internet for jeopardizing their current business model, they would have probably tried by now.

mtts2• 18 years ago

Exactly, or, to put it another way: right now synchronization is yet another way to share files either with someone else or with yourself, and there's already hundreds of methods for doing that, and once everyone starts using web applications exclusively, it'll be a non issue.

ks• 18 years ago

Web applications will not solve our synchronization problems

Example: You want to send a mail using Yahoo Mail where you attach a document created with Google docs. When you created that document you wanted to use an image from Flickr. That's 3 different services that needs to be synchronized. What happens when you add other web applications.

When/if people move to web applications, the synchronization problem moves with them.

zach• 18 years ago

There is a kind of obsession here, one concerned with fabricating narratives and strategies for their own sake.

Bill Gates used every CES keynote in recent memory to go on about the "digital decade" and pose "in the year 2000" scenarios. Of course, this was all after The Road Ahead, a vision book which famously had a shorter shelf life than a bag of potato chips.

Apparently he's not the only one at Microsoft who suffers from this peculiar affliction. All these strategies for a digital millennium and manifestos for an online services marketplace or whatever are laughable. Particularly amusing is how they always find a way to drag every Microsoft business group into their vision. Suddenly, you're supposed to believe that Halo 3 is an embodiment of Microsoft's comprehensive cloud computing paradigm.

Kudos to Joel on calling them on it so entertainingly.

simplegeek2• 18 years ago

Ok, but he's not pointed out a solution. I guess MSFT has lost the battle and solution is to admit it and they should work on their strengths. There is a whole lot of potential in there. I mean look at Vista & IE 7 ;( Even though .NET powers some heavy-traffic websites but the framework is still catching up. LINQ is somewhat cool but they're giving out MVC in (ahem) 2000 and 8.

mrtron• 18 years ago

Exactly, what is he really offering at his company to attract the top talent?

I think he is a pretty smart guy with a successful business - but I am not sure the work environment sounds interesting enough for some of the top grads. Who wants to work on the ASP -> PHP compiler they have, or write a bunch of AJAX?

Unless he has some luring new projects in the work like some sort of cloud based synchronization... :)

simplegeek2• 18 years ago

Well, McCarthy correctly predicated sometime back ;)

"When architects get prizes, the people suffer."

sanj4• 18 years ago

The term "Killer App" has gotten brutally watered down. And y'all aren't helping.

From Wikipedia:

"a killer app is an application so compelling that someone will buy the hardware or software components necessary to run it"

Sorry, DropBox (while very, very well done) doesn't even come close to cutting it.

It doesn't hold a candle to Visicalc. Or email. Or Photoshop.

omouse• 18 years ago

Or video games.

delano6• 18 years ago

Or Winamp.

raganwald5• 18 years ago

I have become sick and tired of the carping and flaming you see from some folks whenever Joel publishes a rant, accusing him of douchebaggery and all sorts of sin. The usual behaviour is that he has one great insight, a bunch of entertaining ranting, and one egocentric point. And on the basis of this, the whole thing is junk and he is a has-been windbag.

I don't go along with that sort of vilification. If a post has one great insight, something I can learn from, I'm a happy man. I can chuckle at Joel complaining about competing for interns with Google as long as I'mn entertained by his prose and intrigued by his central thesis.

I would have loved this post on that basis.

Except.

WTF is with the dig at playing Ultimate? Joel, you have totally lost it this time. Ultimate is the ultimate nerd sport, and interns who play Ultimate are your best hires ever.

Ultimate involves complex plays involving team co-ordination. A skill that just might come in handy working on a software development team. The flight of the disc is the kind of thing the mathematical mind drools over--gyroscopic procession, ballistics, aerodynamics, everything comes in to play.

Ultimate players are healthy and I'll wager can crank code for long hours compared to those who eschew aerobic sports in favour of foosball.

And for those who are still single... Ultimate is a great place to meet people of every gender and orientation. Which leads to cohabitation, the purchase of homes, large mortgages, and a slavish devotion to working your ass off to earn a fat bonus.

Joel, I wanted to like this post, I really did. But you have got to stop making insanely wrong pronouncements about things that matter most.

Like which games interns ought to play ;-)

delano6• 18 years ago

It sounds more like a dig on their programming experience.

raganwald5• 18 years ago

I was trying to satarize all the people elsewhere complaining about the last paragraph. As you can see, I am not a very funny writer.

I like the post very much. His point about Lotus taking over MSFT reminded me of Jamie Zawinski's story about Collabra taking over Netscape:

"Our punishment for that success was that management saw this general-purpose mail reader and said, "since this mail reader is popular with normal people, we must now pimp it out to `The Enterprise', call it Groupware, and try to compete with Lotus Notes!"

"To do this, they bought a company called Collabra who had tried (and, mostly, failed) to do something similar to what we had accomplished. They bought this company and spliced 4 layers of management in above us. Somehow, Collabra managed to completely take control of Netscape: it was like Netscape had gotten acquired instead of the other way around.

"And then they went off into the weeds so badly that the Collabra-driven "3.0" release was obviously going to be so mind-blowingly late that "2.1" became "3.0" and "3.0" became "4.0". (So yeah, 3.0 didn't just seem like the bugfix patch-release for 2.0: it was.)"

http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html

Jesin2• 18 years ago

Just want to point out, this is dated April 2001.

dgabriel• 18 years ago

Um, actually: "This item ran on the Joel on Software homepage on Thursday, May 01, 2008"

Jesin2• 18 years ago

Oops. I guess I fail. I swear I saw a 1.

Hexstream4• 18 years ago

http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/05/01.html

I guess if you omit the 2008 it does look like April 2001......................

jimbokun• 18 years ago

It struck me after reading the article that the company who has solved synchronization is Apple.

All of the data people really care about is on their iPhone/iPod. Contacts, photos, music, TV shows, movies, email, web access. When you think of it, iTunes main purpose is syncing and organizing your media. And with iTunes Store seamlessly syncs a lot of the data people care about from the Internet, also (for pay movies and music, but a lot of free podcasts, too).

While Microsoft continues to try to solve the synchronization problem as an abstraction, Apple has actually created something everyone uses because it Just Works.

jolhoeft• 18 years ago

And interestingly, Apple isn't selling synchronization. They are selling products that use it, but only mention in passing the synchronization. Synchronization isn't a product, it is something you need for certain products.

edw5192• 18 years ago

"And dammit foosball doesn't play itself."

I dunno. With some spare parts and a few hundred lines of code, Trevor Blackwell could probably make it happen.

procrastitron• 18 years ago

It's already been done:

http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/feature-stude...

TrevorJ• 18 years ago

The file syncing issue CANNOT be addressed effectively as a proprietary, closed system. Maybe there are companies out there who have the fortitude to create some sort of framework that can remain open enough to engender enough pan-device support to make it useful to real people who happen not to want to be stuck in the windows (or mac, or whatever) environment on all there electronic devices.

noas• 18 years ago

I hate the last paragraph!

DanielBMarkham• 18 years ago

I don't read this guy that much, and (to the best of my knowledge) I haven't griped about his style.

I like Groove, at least until Microsoft bought it. I use it everyday and it rocks. Whether or not something is over-architected or not is beside the point: does it deliver value for my needs. Groove does.

You can make the case that it does a lot of stuff that I don't care about. So what?

Architecture astronauts take over

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