Software Architects and Enterprise Architects Group
How would you describe a well-architected system?
How would you describe a well-architected system?
@Edward - yes, this is how it goes: we all follow our opinions, and share them for reviews from others who have different ideas. And this is cool :-)
My personal opinion is that selling a product for profit and solving a problem (translate: financial(!) ROI and true innovation) requires opposite mindset, Google's above mentioned mind farming strategy clearly proves that to me. I also think (based on what I have seen around me in the past 20 years) that 99% of the source codes today are simple N-th repetition of simple tasks (GUI event management, serialization, logging, event dispatching, etc); housekeeping; monkey-typing (or in "better case", generated codes), M-th scripting language and the yet the newest, smartest GUI frameworks. Almost zero new idea, innovation, because that requires tons of FAILED experiments, broken deadlines and abandoned development paths beforehand. There is no other way, only in today's sci-fi trash.
Not to mention true knowledge and solution sharing, which is a totally stupid idea from profitability and patent wars point of view.
This is my opinion. It does not make me really happy - but gives me very strong motivation to cut this Gordian knot, and right now I have a quite cool battle axe for that ;-)
Innovation? A new kind of TV??? Well, I think we have different view on this term. For intro, you may check this...
Apple's great innovation was to ... er... reuse the hardware ideas from Xerox PARC (GUI, mouse, tablet, etc.), and put the truly great Objective-C language into the heart of its environment (which is by the way, based on Smalltalk... another "reused idea" from PARC).
Apple followed a very strong vision to make a feature-rich but user affordable hardware (at the beginning it looked impossible), targeted at education first, set a very high standard regarding the GUI to minimize the user learning curve: work as expected. Again: Apple's HIG is a piece of solid gold for any app designer. And this worth the money, builds a faithful user base, so gives the ROI. For a while.
At the same time PARC went down the drain because they had no idea how to make money on their innovation, have not built patent stack, let others "use" their ideas, etc. They just did a great job on a single task: invent the technology required for a paper-less world. Unfortunately WE are unable to imagine that world...
I can tell you my story, how I was able to type in a GUI framework with configurative data binding, and a statistics viewset on an OLAP cube in Objective-C, etc. and so build half of a complete (and currently live) project within 5 months from the first line I wrote in Objective-C (including the complete month that I spent on reading through their docs). Because iOS is truly a great environment, and indeed a well-architected framework, thanks to the great coherence among the language features, data management, GUI features, etc.
But instead of Apple, that is because of the true innovation done at Xerox PARC in 1970!
@Gary - YouTube is a good friend: you can find lots of interviews and documentaries about that era and with Steve Jobs, I have spent quite a few hours watching them.
He was a very conscious businessman, with a strong faith and charisma. You can watch him setting two targets for his group: a price tag and a deadline; the team is to find out what they can squeeze into this box. Is this innovation? Come on...
I think there are several people with these abilities. But that part of your story is true: he went to PARC, and what he saw there just flushed away everything that he wanted to do before, and became obsessed by those ideas. He was sensitive to the potentials, could motivate people with his faith, and present the result in a unique way. True talents of a great salesman.
What I dislike in your story is the "rock on the ground": you seem to be blind to the real work. That rock came from a mine after several years hard work of an elite group. I repeat: they invented an object oriented, message based programming environment (while "an OS should be written in C"), built the first GUI system on it (when others played with a console); created a computer network, laser printer, even the concept of tablets. In 1970, do you remember? The capacity of those machines were well under the CPU of your dishwasher! The results of PARC inventions costed fortunes, and were surely useless, _dead_slow_. When Xerox watched the possible ROI, that was simply zero, they felt that all the money they spent on PARC just went down the sink.
It required someone who started to believe in it, and this was Jobs. He could NOT spend the money and years Xerox did to get these "rocks" himself; and if we add that cost, he could not start his venture. But he had the chance to "take" what he saw, and start building a company to make money on others' results, like a multistage rocket in IT business. He also took a giant risk, but at least he had the chance to win in this way, and so it happened. And we all should be grateful for this, because we actually live in his dream.
But I am a programmer and not a salesman, so I don't care about the famous CEOs (they are the guys who set goals and give resources), but the guys who _do_the_job_: who invented the fundamental elements of a new world, though they looked ugly and useless. And in this case, these are the guys at PARC, so my real respect goes to them - without neglecting the importance of Jobs-like figures. And the same way, about framework architecture, I ask the opinion of an inventor and not a salesman.
@Edward - the question is very good. I will try to summarize my answer to it in a way that you can probably accept (even if you don't agree); a kind of mission statement for my whole career. I need some time for that, though :-)
