Father of WebSphere Leaves IBM For Microsoft

jg21 writes ".NET Developer's Journal is reporting that Don Ferguson, the 'Father of WebSphere,' has left IBM to join Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie's office. Ozzie, whose efforts to rebuild Microsoft have been discussed previously on Slashdot, is gaining a man who while at Blue championed Web services, patterns, Web 2.0, and business-driven development — a potent combo for the future that Microsoft is trying to bring into being." Update: 01/16 12:47 GMT by Z : Previous discussion link fixed.

*shivers*

...the future that Microsoft is trying to bring into being.

*shivers*

Fix to meet Slashdot reporting standards

".NET Developer's Journal is reporting that Don Ferguson, the 'Father of WebSphere,' has left IBM to join Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie's office. Ozzie, whose efforts to rebuild Microsoft have been discussed previously on Slashdot, is gaining a man who while at Blue championed Web services, patterns, Web 2.0, and business-driven development -- a potent combo for the future that Microsoft is trying to bring into being."

Should Microsoft be allowed to hire expert talent in order to stay competitive?

I don't see why he wouldn't want to

Folks at near-VP level get $1M a year in just stock grants. That's not your daddy's options, real stock is given to these folks. Sure it vests over 5 year period, but you get a ton of it every year. I think he'll be one of those rest-and-vest types. Which is perfectly fine by Microsoft if that's the price to pay to decapitate a competitor. There are exceptions to this rule, though, most notably Anders Hejlsberg. But back when he joined there weren't any $1M a year stock payouts, and to be fair, he's worth it.

A good thing

I for one am happy to see the smart people spread around evenly, not just going to google. Competition between smart people encourages innovation, and like it or not, given their market share, having a few smart people sucked into M$ from time to time will reduce global suffering due to technology. Wonder how it feels to have quitting your job will end up on slashdot!?! I don't know how many people *at my last job* noticed when I quit.

Not Surprised

I for one am not surprised by this action. I have heard for a while that morale at IBM is at an all time low and this is the result. I wonder how much other good talent has left IBM that we do not know about.

Re:Not Surprised

As an anonymous coward inside IBM, yes, I can clearly tell you that morale is falling fast. Even my 3rd line manager has confessed he has no idea what is going on at the top levels of IBM, and its showing in everything we do.

It might get turned around - there are a lot of good smart people here (and I work with WebSphere everyday), but every year being asked for 20% more, more regulation compliance load, and seeing bread-and-butter type work all go off-shore... it gets very disheartening. I doubt I will be here by this time next year, by my choice.

Re:Not Surprised

there are a lot of good smart people here (at IBM)

I've noticed in recent years that there are a lot of smart people moving to Microsoft, and yet I can't help feeling that they seem to have a slight problem harnessing all that talent. I mean while Vista is a step in the right direction, it feels like it needs a little more work, and the new GUI API needs more stuff added to it. With all that talent they should be able to deliver something really astounding. With vista I was expecting a database to be part of the O/S, and have transactional operations so an install can be rolled back on failure by just simply not commiting the transaction. I was hoping that legacy apps would be sandboxed but wrapped so that they thought they were running with admin rights, instead there's this rights escalation dialog that pops up continuously.

What happens in big companies that holds people back? Too much micro-management? Too many meetings? Too much design by committee? Too much political infighting? Too much empire building and idea protecting?

What's happening at IBM? What could fix it?

Re:Not Surprised

well, IBM's run by a sales weenie.... which is ok if thats really what you need, but it means that you put 100's of sales people on planes to make sales this quarter, instead of putting a few engineers on planes to make sure you have product ready next year. products slip, and next year you have to put 200 sales people on planes to keep customers happy.

When I got to IBM I was kind of shocked by how free they were with funds (fridge full of soda), now typically you can't spend anything in 3rd and 4th quarter without a 4th or 5th line approval (for non-IBMers thats a boss of a boss of a boss of a boss) even if you were told you had the money in january. its basically wall street style quarter by quarter mismanagement caused by perenial overly optimistic growth estimates... a mania of spending in the begining of the year, followed by stifiling belt tightening in Q3 and Q4 when we discover that revenues didn't grow 20% this year (despite our samuel L jackson inspired "salesman on a plane" strategy) and we need to pare down expenses. you just learn to not try to do much in the last part of the year..

echoing a different post there seems to be a disconnect between IBM corporate and the folks on the ground (someone told me once that armonk wants to behave more like a conglomerate that leeches 20% off the top of the divisions without doing any real investment or management) there seemes to be total confusion between levels of upper management. (perhaps because of uncomfortable pressure to outsource which diminishes US and EU managerial power bases, in favor of management chains in india) I don't think upper management really understands that you can't do things smarter by adding people in volume. but it seems like the outsourcing push always continues. its unfortunate that its being done so covertly, frank discussions with technical minded folk might really help them avoid alot of the potential landmines they seem headed for.

Re:Not Surprised

in recent years that there are a lot of smart people moving to Microsoft

Heh.. and even smarter ones leaving them!

What happens in big companies that holds people back?

See The Peter Principle [wikipedia.org]. ISBN 0-330-02519-8.

What could fix it?

A near-death experience worked wonders for Apple about nine years ago.

-jcr

Information

For those who are unaware of what WebSphere is:

WebSphere refers to a brand of proprietary IBM software products, although the term also popularly refers to one specific product: WebSphere Application Server (WAS). WebSphere helped define the middleware software category and is designed to set up, operate and integrate e-business applications across multiple computing platforms using Web technologies. It includes both the run-time components (like WAS) and the tools to develop applications that will run on WAS.

Source [wikipedia.org]

Missing something...

...championed Web services, patterns, Web 2.0, and business-driven development -- a potent combo for the future that Microsoft is trying to bring into being.

Don't forget the tubes!

so..

a man who while at Blue championed Web services, patterns, Web 2.0, and business-driven development

So this guy comes up with all those damn buzzwords?

Way happy

Ever since they hired on that guy from Walmart to run retail strategy its been getting worse at least at retail. My retailers are having a lower opinion of Microsoft lately and the Microsoft Rep looks overworked and unhappy. I'm beginning to question as a stockholder about the direction of thier retail strategy which seeds the entire industy. Why they hired someone from Walmart I dunno... They definatly should have hired someone from Target.. At least they take care of thier workers and suppliers and practice doing it daily. Probably why Target is expanding in sales at 7 percent a year.

My question being

Are they really going to use him, or just deny him from being used by IBM?

If they are going to use him, I wonder what his non-compete contract will restrict him from, if anything.

Ah, comeon, this is retirement for Don

Being the father of websphere, I would imagine this guy to have his run of it and full of corporate burnout [google.com]. He's looking for a job with less responsibilities to where he can be in a room and give a bunch of ideas and tell others to execute. Collect his cash and go home. He's going to work 9am - 4pm four days a week max and be sitting pretty.

Liken it unto Emit Smith taking a possition at the Cardnials to finish his carrer. It's easy money, it's a day job, like taking candy from a baby.

Meeting of the mediocrities.

So, they had the guy responsible for Lotus Notes, and now they get the guy behind websphere. What next? The guy behind Tivoli?

-jcr

Bring back Louis Gerstner?

There appears to be quite a disconnect between vision, sales and development at IBM.

Louis Gerstner performed more or less a miracle by getting these (technically extremely competent) people to actually work a bit together (in a fairly brutal way, read Who says elephants can't dance [amazon.com]) but either the visionaries are getting too old at IBM (because new talent cannot reach the top without going native) or there's not enough stewardship from the top to contain the internal strife that holds the company back.

IBM has never had a problem doing good things technically, but I personally feel they wasted a Godawful time on Lotus. The user interface still sucks big time, and it's only saving grace was that it was so awkward it stopped virus infections dead in their tracks (OK, and inter-user crypto is better than MS Exchange because it actually exists :-).

If they had the guts to go Open Source all the way (for example, pick an Open Source replacement for Lotus and put resources behind it) they may do something good. At present it looks like everyone is just using corporate inertia to last a couple more years before it falls apart for good (classic example: looking at turnover instead of turnover trending).

The seniority of a board always plays a big role. I remember fighting an uphill battle in another biggie for a project that, at the time, was revolutionary and I was held back every step of the way by oldies who didn't want to rock the boat running a risk only a few years from their pension (it was, of course, called "not exposing the company to risk", forgetting the adage that "ships are safe in the harbour - but that's not what ships are for"). I only won this battle, btw, because I found one senior person heading for retirement in that club who didn't mind going out with a bang and we thus ended up building something that is still working almost 15 years later - and I left after that because I got sick and tired of having to explain the obvious time and time again.

That company needs help, but their Board will have to see that first. Not sure if they have another visionary around - doesn't look like it. If they can't shake off that corporate dullness at the top they'll die like that too. All IMHO, though, but the signs are all there.

I know we're all thinking it...

...so let me ask it out loud: What kind of person does one have to be to leave IBM and join Microsoft?

Seriously: What's the big deal?

I've read a few snide remarks in the last 20 seconds allready, so I guess I'm not the only one notably unimpressed. Yet I have to ask: What is Websphere all about? What's the big, fat, hairy deal? It appears to me as some giant bloated hunk of web related software that appears to have just as much use as others of it's kind (BEA, Sun [Whatever Server] and so forth) with huge incomprehensible backend that have no practical use and application in getting the job done.

Tell me, is it just some piece of 'ware to give business users a reason to buy more servers or does it have a real use? What can Webspere or any other large commercial "Appplication Server" do that any halfway mature OSS web system like Zope, Tomcat, Drupal, Joomla Framework or Rails can't? (And, yes, I know they are classified as different types of software, but all in all they do the more or less the same thing)

Someone with knowledge about Websphere (or some simular product) please enlighten me.

Father of Websphere?

Holy crap, I always thought that Websphere was another one of Dr. Frankensteins little ones....

IBM continues to flounder

Whomever they can't replace in India, China and Brazil they cut loose onto bullshit projects that go nowhere because of 99 layers of management and a 'save our way to prosperity' mentality. Senior people at IBM are treated like Gods, comparatively speaking. The minions are denied training, travel, education, pay raises, bonuses while benefits get worse every year. First and second line managers are turned over like flapjacks so that the people who actually do the work have 2, 3, 4 managers a year and then if they're lucky they won't stumble into a department that's being 'reorganized' out of existence forcing them to find another job or quit. Meanwhile, the aristocrats lavish literally hundreds of millions of dollars on themselves while they send out epistles that a) extol the workers greatness and b) warn them to work harder for less for the sake of the firm.

I can only imagine that if a senior guy leaves IBM for greener pastures they must have already decided, for no obvious reason at all to either kill all that person's products and projects, or, some palace infighting has left them holding their own ass.

I sold all my IBM and MS stock last week because it finally went up and it was clearly time to bail before they fuck it up again. And this observer's opinion is that IBM may be broken up and spun off in the near future and MS may split into several different companies as well. Because neither of them can get out of their own way.

Frankenstein's Monster

mix some notes with websphere and MS will truly have a pile on their hands.

smart people

Microsoft hires smart people. In fact, people with a bit of prestige or flamboyance get sucked in regularily (remember Blake Stone.) The good news is; after the Offer you Cannot refuse, those people fade away into total obscurity. But Microsoft KNOWS that some people have followers, so when Microsoft seconds someone, often they count on getting all those minions. And... only those people are in the Microsoft fold, the blinders are on and the stagnation begins. The festering pot of has-been good ideas not invented at Redmond that calls itself the Microsoft campus.

Re:Nebulous Terminolgy

So based upon a Slashdot summary, your informed opinion is that IBM is better off without the architect of one of the most successful app server platforms ever? Do you even know what WebSphere is?

Re:Nebulous Terminolgy

If he takes his nebulous EJB spec with him, I'm all for it. Sun really should have cleaned that thing up before releasing it to the world. It's great in theory, but in practice almost no one implements the damn standard correctly! (Or at least, in a useful fashion.)

Re:Nebulous Terminolgy

Do you even know what WebSphere is?

An orb of internets??

Re:Nebulous Terminolgy

Orb of Internets:
Binds when picked up
Mainhand
-15 Stamina
+7 Intelligence
-12 Strength
-2 Spirit
Equip: Decreases actual work done by up to 20.

WebSphere is not all it's cracked up to be.

I've done a fair amount of work with WebSphere. Just because it's prevalent in terms of its usage, it does not mean that it's a good solution for the problems at hand.

Like many enterprise-grade tools today, it's extremely over-designed. The buffet of buzzwords in the summary is complete correct, and shows the mindset behind the WebSphere Application Server. The only reason it is so popular is because IBM has powerful marketing and sales forces. They'll convince your CIO, CTO and other managers that you just have to use their products, hardware, and of course their support services.

It's not surprising that they push such over-designed solutions. The larger the system, the more powerful hardware it needs to run on ($$$ in IBM's pocket), and of course the easier it breaks (again, $$$ in IBM's pocket). A lot of the WebSphere systems I've worked with could have been reimplemented in Python instead of Java, run on several decent Linux servers, while using PostgreSQL as the database backend. Independent Python consultants could easily provide sufficient support, often quicker and far cheaper than what you'd get from IBM. And competent Python professionals are quite plentiful in any fair-sized city.

Re:Chairs

Did Ballmer spend the day mending a broken chair.

No, he spent the day working on his chair throwing and Google killing techniques.

Re:Hmm...

Unless Microsoft has something that Big Blue doesn't besides better offices then I'd probably rather stay with IBM.

which is exactly why he went to microsoft... ;)

Re:Websphere is crap

I've seen Websphere as its progressed from nothing more than an patched version of Tomcat with no support for EJB's all the way to 6.1 where it implements all kinds of support for web services and SOA implementations.

What? WebSphere was never "a patched version of Tomcat." And to say the early versions had "no support for EJBs" is a little disingenuous, considering that the spec didn't exist yet -- not to mention that it was IBM that invented EJBs, not Sun.

Re:...and good riddance.

Huh what you are talking about, J2EE is defacto standard in enterprises, banks, insurance companies. IBM is making big money with this stuff. While websphere is hated very often, it is used quite widely. It is a beast to develop for but very robust in production use (hence people often use smaller app servers for development and WAS for deployment) As for bloated and expensive I agree... :-(

Re:...and good riddance.

heh, that's my sentiment too.

I worked with WebSphere 2.x and 3.x in the relatively early days of EJB ( 1999 - 2001 ) and it was a total mess.

2.x didn't even work with EJBs, though it was sold as a server having EJB support. We even had a couple of Global Services guys come in to "show us how it's done". Bottom line was that the thing would crash if there ever was more than 1 concurrent request to any entity bean. After a couple of weeks the guys left and told us to wait for 3.0. Lovely.

3.x worked ok once (if?) you got it installed (and until it corrupted itself). This was no mean feat since, instead of using configuration files it would install a whole instance of DB2 as a config repository. I'm not talking about the db your application would be using, oh no... it needed a schema for its own config. Oh, and how would you manage this thing ? You would use the admin server of course. This was a pre-configured instance of the server with an admin web-app that would basically muck with the data in the aforementioned configuration database. This all was a cute idea except for the fact that it took hundreds of megs of RAM at a time when development machines and even servers didn't have all that much. Then of course, if anything went wrong, which it often did, especially during divelopment, you were basically SOL. Not only was the logging bad, but also there was just nothing you could really do if things went wrong because of the damn configuration database which was a black box. So you could try to delete a server instance and create a new one and
then redefine your app hoping that would fix things.

What if the config server didn't start or was acting wonky? oh, uninstall everything and try again. (If you were running on windows, usually this meant actually reinstalling windows because WS and DB2 would leave all sorts of stuff in the registry and sometimes in system32 that would confuse the installer or just make it seem to succeed while leaving you with a broken install.)

I briefly used 4.x and 5.x later and they seemed better but were still a big pain to install and deal with compared to other options.

I'm the first to admit that EJBs are of questionable choice given their overhead but if you're going to use them, I don't understand why ANYONE would use WS when you could get WebLogic instead. Of late, of course Jboss is a pretty good choice and, as mentioned, it's free.
(Besides, if you're doing anything new now, EJB3 is the way to go anyway and i don't think anyone other than Jboss even has support for that. )

Enough reminiscing from me, but man am i glad i don't have to deal with WS anymore (at least for now).

Re:...and good riddance.

I have been with the WebSphere Portal Support team since 2003, and the entire time our sales have done nothing but go up, as workplace runs on top of that as well as several other apps that ibm sells, it continues to grow. A large number of companies are using Portal it is doing anything but not selling. V6 just came out and actually has a nice interface. the one thing about portal is that it is not something you install and suddenly it does everything for you, it is just a framework to bring all your content together in one place(ui) so that your users are not clicking all over the place trying to find this or that app. and now with the JSR 168 standard it is only getting better as your portlets are more mobile from system to system, and will only inspire other systems to write portlets for things like oracle and seibel and the like there by enhancing portal's value. it is not a do all for anybody but it can create a great ui experience for your customers.

Re:...and good riddance.

Let me tell you two things:

1) Big companies needs big support. Who will guarantee their servers will be up'n'running 24x7? Who will pay the fines if a failure stops the big company from operating for, say, 3 hours? That's the IBM's market. IBM is big enough (and have people enough) to support this kind of company.

2) In my experience as a Java developer, I can say WebSphere is one of the fastest application servers in the market. Even faster when running in real servers (not that cheap toys [serverpronto.com]). JBoss (opensource) is really good, but isn't enough for some companies. The difference between JBoss and WebSphere is that JBoss is made for developers (it's easy to install/configure) and WebSphere is made for performance. It's not a trivial task to install/configure, but once configured, it is fast as hell :-)

Re:Nebulous Terminolgy

What being served from the web could NOT be called "web services"?

Those things that aren't SOAP- or XMLRPC-encoded, for a start.

Re:...and good riddance.

LOL. Workplace is gone. Even the brand name is now markedly absent. See you next week in Orlando.

Flamebait? You cowards! Half the responses agree

You may mark this flamebait, but most of the people who responded agree with some or all of what I said. Who's the coward? I'm just a bit critical of Emperor Mills' choice in clothing.