[nylug-talk] Why does "enterprise" imply "Java"?

[Sunny Dubey]

Am Mittwoch, 5. Juli 2006 13:30 schrieb Michael Bacarella:

> But the debate never seems to even come up: Enterprise Java wins the
> argument before it starts.  Why?  If the answer is that in the end, it
> still saves money, I can live with that.  But if there is no good answer,
> it spells opportunity.

One word: Marketing

Marketing plays a large part in decision making.  But lets not talk about 
IT-marketing, because we're all part of IT and thus we actually have a clue 
and are that much biased.  So lets talk about food marketing:  "organic".  
Java is expensive, and so are organic foods.

How many times have you compared the regular stuff to the organic stuff and 
purchased the latter because you simply felt it would taste better and be of 
higher quality ?  Everybody has! But how many of you guys actually know what 
constitutes for "organic", and how the food was raised, picked, packed,  
shipped, etc ?  You don't and so you make ignorant decisions. (I have too!)

The same could be said about audio hardware (Bose vs real audiophile 
companies), CDRs (you almost never know who the real OEM behind the disk is), 
furniture (IKEA vs everyone else), etc etc etc

At the end of the day all the winners (java included) have unbeatable 
marketing behind them.  IBM, Oracle, everyone and their grandma supports Java 
and so people buy into it.  The problem with "alternative" technologies isn't 
so much with the technology at all, but its with finding the right group to 
market it.  So I'm sure there is lots of "glue" code written in 
perl/python/etc that make much of this "enterprise software" work.  But 
you'll never see full page glossy ads for them ....

(If we were to dive futher into this marketing, we could start talking about 
the "feedback loop", which is the emergence of other products centered around 
the main product.  Think of the Ipod:  Its super popular, and thus so many 
other ipod-supporting products thrive on its popularity.  Which inturn only 
feeds the Ipod's popularity.  The same holds true for Java.)

(not spell checked, sorry)

-- 
Sunny Dubey

  mail: sunny at opencurve.org
  tele: 212.333.3542