Re: Apple WebObjects For PC
Re: Apple WebObjects For PC
- Subject: Re: Apple WebObjects For PC
- From: "Paul D. Yu" <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2004 08:03:15 -0500
Are we expecting a little too much from Apple?
The economic facts surrounding WebObjects just does not warrant the
development of a PC based IDE Tool Suite, right?
For example, IntelliJ IDEA, which is just an IDE, costs $499/seat. It
is a very good cross platform IDE, but it costs almost as much as
WebObjects, which comes with an IDE, OO-Relational Modeling tool and
framework, OO-HTML Modeling tool and framework, etc. etc. only costs
$699 at full retail. If Apple spung WebObjects out to WebObjects Inc.,
with the objective of building a cross platform WebObjects tool suite,
could they sustain their business with this? NO! WebObjects is on par
with the market leaders of BEA WebLogic and IBM WebSphere in
capability, but is two magnitude lower in price. For the price of
those AppServers, you can buy two fully loaded XServe, with the RAID
unit, and several Dual PowerMacs and a few PBs and WebObjects. Yet we
want Apple to build a PC based EOModeler and WebObjects builder.
When WebObjects cost $5,000/developer seat and $50,000 per server
deployment, there was a vibrant consulting and development community.
That also was the time when the tools were ported to the Windows
environment. The consultants can claim high rates for an cost
effective tool to build high-end applications. Once the price of the
product was dropped, that consulting community died because they could
not justify their rates. Customers can not and will not believe that a
$699 tool (retail), $365 (federal), $99 (education) can be anything
other than a toy. They would not pay for $200-$300/hour to a
consultant that recommended WebObjects. There is no elasticity in the
demand curve of WebObjects. When a demand curve is elastic, Drop the
price and demand picks up. Apple has dropped the price by one
magnitude on the developer tool and demand didn't pickup one bit. The
Price drop on the deployment platform was two magnitude, and nothing
happened. In fact it killed off that vibrant consulting community.
WebObjects is too good for itself. Almost all consulting companies are
in the business of selling time. Yes, we're there to deliver
solutions, but the BIG consulting firms sell time to their customers.
WebObjects' 3-10 x productivity gains over other tools/frameworks, cuts
their revenue by 3-10x. A BIG project that could be done with 100
people for 1 year in other tools, can be done, on the extreme end of
Webobjects, with 10 people. Doing the math for you, 100*$200,000/year
= $20,000,000 in gross revenue for the other tool; $2,000,000 for
WebObjects. The consultant doesn't want to do it because they can make
more. The client doesn't want it because $2,000,000 just seems too
low. It can not be true.
This is just like Apple hardware and OS, right? A MSCE loves the MS
environment because it breaks all the time. Therefore, the MSCE is
needed by the customer. If he recommended Apple solutions, which does
not break all the time, it just works, then he is not needed by the
customer and he makes not money. So he doesn't recommend Apple.
On OpenSourcing WebObjects.
WebObjects is a strategic weapon for Apple. They will never opensource
it. WebObjects is used on every major Apple web portal, Apple
Store(S), .Mac, iTMS, Software Updater, ADC, etc. etc. It allows Apple
to build CRM solutions faster and cheaper than anyone else. Why would
the opensource that? They wouldn't! The engineering costs associated
with WebObjects is peanuts when allocated across all the internal Apple
projects. Any money they make on us is just gravy. Opensourcing has
no advantages to Apple, so they would not do it.
Just my $0.02.
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