Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2007 10:39:29 -0400
From: Joshua Smith <email@hidden>
Subject: In defense of Apple's Java Team
To: Java Developers <email@hidden>
Message-ID: <email@hidden>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed
Sun's "bug parade"stretches to the moon and back, and if you don't
have thousands of votes, you're not going to see any action on your
bug for years.
I'd like to defend Sun here. I found a bug that killed my product
(actually a service), which uses JMF (YES, that JMF) in an applet (a
real applet that uses firefox, safari, IE, etc.). The JMF support
team (a really small team) worked with me to identify the bug, get
it into the queue, give it a high priority, and make sure it was in
the next release. I was very impressed.
It's true that some issues seem to reside on the bug list forever.
Still, I was surprised by how well they handled this particular
issue. My support people were fielding daily calls from customers
about this problem. With Sun's help, we published a workaround and
were able to promise a fix with the next release.
Oh, and I run a six-person company. We have no real clout.
Thanks. The difference in philosophy between Apple and Sun are huge on
this issue. On Sun's site you can see all the bugs in the state they
are. You can search the bugs and find workarounds. So yes, it can seem
worrying and daunting. But it tells you things as they really are.
Nothing is hidden. People can communicate and everyone can build on
the work of others. This is called community. It puts faith in the
community of developers.
Here with Apple the data in the Bug Database is closed, so as a result
you don't get the community participation that you could get, and the
Apple team is therefore also overstretched.
This closeness lends itself better to marketing, because a marketeer
can play with the minimum of information available to get people to
see what faith demands. Hence the constant "have faith" terms bounced
around here. The problem is that if faith is lost or put in doubt
there is nothing else to go on, and so fear follows closely and
dramatically in its heels. Hence Apple developers will tend to be
either extreemly faithful or not be there at all.
Large corporations that cannot build their strategies on faith, cannot
of course buy into this. So Apple cannot get into Large corporations.
The question the follows: when is it appropriate to use these
strategies? When is Openness better than Closed Faith, and vice versa?
My suggestion is that for a consumer market the faith based approach
is probably the right one, because the consumer neither has the time
nor the knowledge to understand the issues correctly. For them faith
in the product is important, and this is tied to image, which is tied
to marketing, which needs to careful control information.
With OSX Apple decided to take a dual strategy, making a strong break
with their System 9 past. By adopting the Unix kernel and thereby
massively reducing their research costs, they build a blue ocean
strategy [1] by removing the cost of OS research and building on the
open and free standards. This is what I call a purple ocean strategy
[1]. On top of this open layer they then build a relatively closed
consumer market, and differentiate themselves in other areas such as
aesthetics and ease of use.
Apple is therefore employing both closed and open strategies. And so
it seems to me that they could be more open in the Java space without
this creating any danger to their consumer market. After all this is
already what is happening at the OS level. So tales about Apple being
closed in the consumer side should not translate to their needing to
be closed in the software development side. These are two completely
different markets. By being more open on the developer side
furthermore Apple opens up possibilities in the Enterprise.
Harry
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