Fashions come and go. It seems so natural, there are dress fashions, health fashions, diet fashions, so why not software fashions too?
Well, actually, we have seen in the last article why not. A better question is, are fashions "natural", and how do they start?
Well, I can't say how a dress fashion starts. None of my outfits are concerned with fashion in the least, they are concerned with placing things that I need to carry with me in places that don't annoy me while walking or working.
I can tell you, though, how fashion in software starts. It starts with a hype.
Now, of course, the hype doesn't come from no-where.
Remember Java? It was the hype of the time when I was just starting to discover the internet. It was started not by a community of developers, or researchers at a university, or anything like that. It was started by SUN, an enormous hardware, software and service company. Just as, about ten years later, Microsoft tried to jump on the same bandwagon with .NET. Both of those "hypes" were generated and pushed by the Sales/Marketing divisions of those companies.
Another fashion is XML. This one is a very different kind of fashion, since it, from all I can see, started out from W3C creating XML to use as a standardized replacement for HTML. It was a free text markup language backwards-compatible with HTML and extensible, too. It is very good in that role. However, I can't quite find out who's idea it was to use it for pure data. It wasn't obvious, since better formats exist since 1985 (if libraries for ASN.1 would be as widely available as those for XML, it's perceived complexity would not be an issue). Nor is it difficult to design a better format for that purpose, text-based or binary.
But one of the most frequent sentences said at the beginning of the XML hype was "if all applications can XML, they can all exchange data with each other!". Which, as you probably know by now, is neither so, nor does it make sense, since there is no way in XML itself to assign any intrinsic "meaning" to a tag, an application doesn't know whether a tag "p" stands for paragraph, person, parity or pound, neither is there a way to declare meaning like this in the underlying schema documents (though this might eventually evolve, but so it could with any other hierarchical(-lish) extensible language).
The sentence, though, was marketing. Not of the big companies for the consumer, mind you, back then, he was unlikely to encounter XML anywhere but as XHTML on a web page. But: enough people who invest into IT don't actually understand it, as you could nicely see during the bursting of the .com bubble. And they bought shares in new and promising buzzword startups, thinking, "Yey, now we can invest into companies making programs that can understand everything!". Some of them actually survived and made money. But so do the top levels in a pyramid scheme (which, as you probably know, generates no additional value
whatsoever)
In all three cases there would have been prior, superior alternatives with existing infrastructure to invest into, and extend. You know, progress. And the only reason it didn't happen, was marketing.
Which lets us conclude: marketing is not a friend of progress.
But the marketing division doesn't just go out there and start promoting things, either. Neither is it a mere coincidence that marketing buzzwords are parts of startups' business plans. What is the reason for marketing? Is there maybe an even bigger enemy of progress lurking in the background? The answer -- in the next article!
No comments:
Post a Comment