David Lee Todd, Unknown Product Manager



	David Lee Todd, Unknown Product Manager People who love sausages and software should never watch either being made

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Tuesday May 30, 2006

Culture clash at JavaOne

As Sun becomes more and more a software company, maybe it's time for us to think about who our audience is. This year, for the first time, former SeeBeyond customers got to go to the JavaOne keynote as part of their attendance at the separate Horizons conference for Java CAPS users. Here is what one long-time SeeBeyond user wrote on the SeeBeyond independent mailing list:

"The JavaOne Keynote session on Tuesday was a waste of time for us. There were little to no discussions on integration. It was definitely geared towards the Java eggheads ...."

Enterprise software is a different animal. It's more about stringing together off-the-shelf applications than slinging code. In a sense, JavaOne is a throwback to the glory days when software developers worked with nothing more than a box, an OS and a compiler. I should know -- I used to write COBOL for a living. That's why the Java-enabled cellphones they were selling there flew off the shelves. The cellphone is a bare-metal machine where you can still do scratch development. There is still a huge need for scratch development, but it takes place more and more at software vendors, and less and less in the end-user enterprise.

The enterprise CIO doesn't care about how easy it is to write code using NetBeans: to him writing code at all is a nuisance. He wants applications that work out of the box. Sun sells those applications now, and sells the systems that other vendors' applications run on. Maybe we should think about adding JavaTwo, just for CIOs.

Posted by davidleetodd ( May 30 2006, 08:11:20 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

Comments:

Yes David, we need a global event (Sun World?) oriented to CIOs audience (which JavaONE does not pretend to be). I worked for a SW company that uses to have, in their big annual conference, a parallel agenda oriented to CIOs.

Posted by Ivan Rodriguez on May 30, 2006 at 02:23 PM PDT #