Frameworks
Working in the Phone Booth
Corporate defections may indicate change in Microsoft's play in the area of Web services and SOA.
Despite decades of runaway growth, when it gets right down to it the software development industry is as tight as a phone booth (that is, for those of you who remember what a phone booth looks like).
Nowhere does the close-knit nature of our industry become more apparent than in the case of surprising, high-profile corporate defections. Whether it's Kai-Fu Lee reportedly causing Steve Ballmer to go all Bobby Knight on a conference room chair, or Brad Silverberg igniting a spasm of lawsuits and employee defections from Borland, it seems that key personnel moves can expose the raw machinery of our industry.
So when IBM Fellow Don Ferguson, the father of WebSphere and a force in the area of Web services standards, opted to jump ship from Big Blue to join forces in Redmond, it was more than a surprise. It may have been unprecedented. We asked around, and no one seems to remember the last time an IBM fellow walked away from the job like this.
The bigger question, of course, is what could this defection mean for Microsoft's play in the area of Web services and SOA? Microsoft isn't talking, but a few people who have worked with Ferguson are, and they have some thoughts on what his move could mean for developers tracking the Web services and SOA space. Check out Chris Kanaracus' investigation into this unusual defection ("Enterprising Mind" begins on the cover).
As a company, Microsoft is making some important moves of its own. Less than two weeks before the company celebrated the 10th birthday of the Visual Studio IDE at the VS Live! conference in San Francisco, Microsoft announced that it would be shuttering Visual FoxPro support and development. The announcement comes in what has been a season of development-related retirements by Microsoft, with both Visual Basic 6 and J# recently sent off to pasture.
The legendary data-savvy development tool, which fell under Microsoft's stewardship when Redmond purchased Fox Software in 1992, has survived for years despite being a clear misfit in the snap-tight family of Microsoft development tools. The writing was on the wall back in 2000 when the strategic .NET initiative set sail without FoxPro on board. It was only the outcry of the tight-knit Fox dev community that kept the tool alive for so long.
Retiring operating systems and applications is tough. IT shops face a huge task as they migrate to software with an assured roadmap. But retiring a programming language? The mechanics of switching to a new dev platform and managing the migration of bits between languages is hard enough. The human factor is harder still.
What's your take? How should the ranks of dedicated FoxPro and VB6 developers respond to these retirements? And as a development manager, how important is it to cross-train coders and proactively move off of sunsetting platforms? E-mail me at
mdesmond@reddevnews
. We'd love to hear your opinions!
About the Author
Michael Desmond is editor in chief of Visual Studio Magazine and former editor in chief of Redmond Developer News. He has served
as senior editor of news at PC World and executive editor at Multimedia
World magazine, and has written for dozens of publications and Web sites.
Desmond has also written four computing books, including Microsoft
Office 2003 in 10 Simple Steps or Less.