Ramblings 2.0

Everything is “2.0” nowadays so, why not my blog titles…? Things are going fast this year and if you’re not noticing, the things you thought you knew, are obsolete before you know it and in another blink, the world has been re-shaped again… A while ago Oracle announced there intentions to acquire Sun. Shortly after I saw the keynotes from the Google I/O Conference and thought “Wow, this Google Wave has all the ingredients to reshape the “not enterprise world” (at least not yet) but, “at least”, has the potential to directly compete with Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino, Oracle Beehive, etc…”. The world is shifting.

I mean, I know, or at least that is, IMHO, what I see what Oracle is doing, is taking on “the war” from the trenches, from the server room. Slowly moving from the server area, to the mid tier, to the front end, towards hardware and Open Source / OS, to application logic / Java onto your desktop and mobile. The only thing Oracle now needs, IMHO, would be a take over like something like, for instance, “Amazon”, to become a second Google. Result instant: “Oracle Docs/Apps in the Cloud” or “Oracle in the Cloud”.

Google is doing the same “backwards” or maybe “sideways”. They build their mainframe / Google Grid Center on which the Google Search app is depending on and expanding sideways, Google Maps, Google Apps, Google Mail, Google Docs, Picassa, YouTube, Google API’s…and combined these data streams can now be further opened up via HTML 5 (GUI-wise), which enable them to not only create an impressive app like Google Wave, but control now also a lot of the data out there and/or has gathered information about that data… Now the logical next step to conquer the Windows OS Desktop and hand held/mobile market via Google Chrome OS… Google is a good example of my old motto: “Whoever the data controls, controls the (IT) world”.

Open Source apparently not only binds people, it looks like it is also now a method to conquer old castles of dominance and / or creates a Google lock-in… Has Windows been sleeping? Although maybe now more stable via .Net Frameworks and more secure via solutions like Vista (disable apps and services until you need it – instead of open up all and try to secure them), the software is (still) not OS independent (“IE8 on Linux, Apple?”).

I had a funny “deja vu” a while ago with a developer arguing that Google API stuff would never conquer the Enterprise Business… It sounded a lot like old discussions I heard years ago regarding that Java never would overwhelm the Oracle Forms area. Java would never be ready to be used for Enterprise applications. Yep. Right.

How much will perish in this skirmish? I wonder about MySQL, Berkeley DB… Big companies, like the ones mentioned, IMHO, can never hold up all that energy to keep things alive for the community. In the end, they have to survive as well. This week I read that XHTML is one of those initiatives that perished in such a skirmish in favor of HTML 5. So will be able to derive useful data out of all those cool flashy HTML 5 UI’s and pages, I thought…

Regarding XML, you would need an agreement on namespaces, XML Schemas, otherwise data could be ending up meaningless… So I checked on the “Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) about the future of XHTML” web page which ultimately for me came down to the following scentence: “An HTML Working Group issue on decentralized extensibility is still open and unresolved. The text/html serialization of HTML5 contains extensibility points but does not provide a decentralized mechanism.” Apparently it is time to come up with new JDBC/ODBC/WDBC ( “W” like “WWW”  :-)  ) interfacing. If we have to wait on rivaling companies…

If the Google gird would be called a mainframe; Were would we stand? Are we back to Client/Server? . Are we going towards a “Client Server in the Cloud” situation…”? Is who gets control over the data, our data, the survivor, Google, Oracle, Microsoft, or … ? Whatever “they” do, we don’t like to be locked in. I believe in the “Us”. One cool invention and we all switch to Apple again. “iPod here I come…”

Just some “Ramblings 2.0” stuff I am wrestling lately with in my head…maybe food for thought…?

😎