Is Microsoft really the dark side?

Unlike some of colleagues and friends, I have worked mostly with open source products and I like the open source world. Most of the technology is well built and there is a community of developers, testers and business sponsors who spend alot of time and money to get the product right. There seems to be a common understanding that open source technology is flexible enough where it can be customized to a certain requirement and they cost is minimal when working with Microsoft.

On the other hand, Microsoft tends to dictate when its new products and technologies are going to released. They also dictate how their products should be licensed and flexibility is minimal. As a technologist, they seem to black box all of their technology.

Here are some of typical complaints regarding Microsoft:
Not Best of Breed
I have heard people complain left and right that their product is not the best of breed. For example their SQL Server product line is not the best relational database and it is ideal for small to medium implementations.

Tie Their products to the Windows Operating System
A few years ago, the technology community was complaining that Microsoft tied their internet browser, the Internet Explorer, to the operating system and that is how they beat their competition in the internet browser space

They eye-gouge their customers with licenses and other products
More and more end users are complaining that Microsoft is clamping down on how licenses are tracked in their software. It's now ever harder to steal their software.

I admit that these are valid complaints and lately I have realized their products aren't that bad.

Things I like about Microsoft products:
Their products integrate well together. I used to take this fact for granted until I worked with Oracle suite of products. Oracle's products don't talk to other products but they don't even talk to each other.

Their products are easy to use.
Beginning with their Windows product line, Microsoft products are easy to use and they are visually appealing to their end users. Until three or four years ago, Java didn't have robust debugging in their various IDEs. I remember working with Visual Studio many years ago and I still remember that their debugging was the best. SQL Server has had a great Graphical User Interface (GUI) for many years. During this Oracle only provided SQL*Net.

Even though we complain Microsoft is being selfish and opportunistic as business. I have to say that they have never sacrificed their core capabilities which is:
their products are easy to use and their products integrate well with each other. It is true that their products aren't the best in the breed but at least theywork.

In the last year or two, I have been extremely disappointed in how Oracle products are built and how they work. All of Oracle's products are tied to the database product line. You look at their JMS implementation, their PL/SQL based web services, their ESB which is tied to their database, etc., and etc. Oracle is doing the same thing as Microsoft did. As Microsoft tied their products to their operating system, we see that Oracle is currently tying their products to the database. If I were a CIO or the CTO, I wouldn't buy anything from Oracle other than their relational database products.

Unlike Microsoft, IBM sells their products for an extremely high price. Their products work well, unfortunately I wouldn't trust IBM since their business practices are questionable.

The biggest competition for Microsoft is Google. I am still wondering what is Google. Google sells online advertising, they have a search appliance and bunch of software products which are good but they don't address any core requirement. They seem to create a buzz on how they market their products. For instance, remember how they created a buzz for their email capability. They gave email accounts via email invites which created a buzz. They are geniuses in viral marketing but they really don't have a product. What I mean by a product, if I were to liquidate Google then what would I sell. Their search technology, their online software and their advertising business and now their mobile software. According my sources in US Department of Justice, Google's Android software is currently used by alot hackers to hack into mobile phone. Things like this make wonder...Is Google really out there to improve our lives or just market themselves a higher profit margin.

Yahoo! - I like Yahoo!. I have been a loyal customer of Yahoo! from 1996. They categorize and sell information, information products and more. I really like their stuff and their product might suffer a little when Microsoft buys them but I would rather see Microsoft buy them than Google beat them.

In conclusion, I still prefer open source technologies but I now also appreciate the value of Microsoft. They are not that bad after all.

I am going coo coo for Popfly!!!

Tonight I went to my Popfly account and I was very impressed. Microsoft has added features which make it the best online Web 2.0 editor. They have added ways to add data sources. A pseudo database where you add a table using comma delimited syntax. Popfly has also added the capabilities of creating "blocks". Blocks are like components of software logic which can easily intergrate with other blocks or services. They have added features to the "block" where you can integrate it to web services by simply pointing to the Web Service Description Language (WSDL). You can write code for the block in C# or in a XML structured format. You can create mashups by simple drag and drop or write .net centric code. Like Google web pages, Popfly also lets you create web pages by simple drag and drop. I have to say that Microsoft has put alot of effort into this product compared to Google Mashup Editor or Yahoo! Pipes. Microsoft is probably eyeing this a possible collaborative programming IDE for the Visual Studio family. It is a not a bad idea.

FYI - Couple of weeks ago, Microsoft contacted me to see if I was interested in working for their Visual Studio line. With products like this and Google's snobby attitude towards folks with non IT degrees, I might have to reconsider. I enjoy programming, architecting systems and just being a technology geek. Is something wrong with me? Anyway in the next few entries, I might explore Popfly's capabilities in more in depth.

The Ultimate Data Mining Sport

A few days ago, I came across a show on ESPN on the concept of Sabermetrics. According to Wikipedia, "Sabermetrics is the analysis of baseball through objective evidence, especially baseball statistics." The sport of baseball is a unique sport since it is dominated by statistics. As many of you, hitting a ball, which is the size of a tennis ball, with a stick is an not easy task. Now imagine if the ball is coming at you around eighty to ninety miles per hour. What makes it even more hard is that the ball velocity, location and the trajectory of the ball may be different from one pitch to another pitch. The hitter has to decide to hit the ball if it goes through or touches the strike zone. The hitter has to guess what the pitcher's tendencies are and where and what type of pitch he, the pitcher, will throw. As you can see, statistics are the core of any baseball game. Lineups and pitching match-ups maybe altered depending on the pitcher, hitter, weather, ballpark and the time of the game. As an avid fantasy baseball player, I am aware of some of the stats and I alter my fantasy line up everyday.

What does this all mean? Since baseball is game of stats, Major League Baseball (MLB) general managers are relying more on analytical systems like Sabermetrics which give quantitative data on whether a player is valuable to the team or not. Sabermetrics captures statistics which are usually overlooked by regular stats. For example, Sabermetrics does not put alot of value in a player who hits for a .320 average. It does, however, give the player a higher rank if the player hits .320 average compared to a player who is hitting .098 average when the bases are loaded in a tie game at the bottom of the ninth. Yes the Runs Batted In (RBI) stat would say this however the player's RBI stat might be inflated if the player bats in a lot of runs when the games are not close. This might indicate that the player does not do well in pressure.

Even though folks in baseball have figured out on how to quantitatively score their assets to put a better product on their field, IT folks have been struggling with this for number of years. IT folks have a grand vision called Enterprise Architecture where they can map every asset, process, system and other IT variables and start seeing the gaps in their IT enterprises. AS IT business managers look at EA as their panacea for monitoring their enterprises, computers scientists are looking to fields like ontologies and referential systems to capture "inferred relationships" in the IT domain. I believe the IT people, including myself and all of the architects, developers, testers, program managers, project managers, CIO, etc., etc, should take a step back and learn from the baseball folks before we all strike out and head back to the dugout shaking our heads and pondering, "How did I miss that?"

AIXM is promising...

For the last few months, I have been indirectly involved in reviewing and doing analysis on the Aeronautical Information Exchange Model (AIXM) XML standard. After doing some initial review and attending the AIXM User Conference 2008, I believe this XML standard has a lot of promise. Here are couple of reasons:

1. Built on a mature and stable standard - AIXM is built on the Geography Markup Language (GML) which is a well accepted Geospatial standard. I believe this is a smart move from AIXM's perspective. AIXM can be used by all GML compliant applications with minor tweaking. When I asked the AIXM folks on why certain elements are modeled a certain way, their answer was that they tried to follow the GML standard. I believe this is a valid answer since they are merely extending the GML standard.


2. Domain specific - Unlike the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) which has multiple domains, AIXM only addresses the aeronautical domain. Once again this is smart from a governance perspective since their Communities of Interest (COI) are limited. Even though NIEM allows various groups take ownership of each domain, NIEM is facing a problem with harmonization of data entities within the NIEM domain.

Things I would like to see from the next AIXM version:

1. Polish, Polish and Polish - Since AIXM is a international standard, I would like to see the standard XML schemas to be polished which includes:
   • adding annotations to each datatype and element
   • remove embedded elements within datatypes and elements and expose each datatype and element. This will make the standard more flexible and loosely coupled.
   • each element is uniquely named, this is quite common in the AIXM standard now since there are embedded elements in the datatypes


2. Publish XSL files - If AIXM published XSL transformation files, then it will be possible for applications to easily migrate to new versions of AIXM. I know this will take alot of work but I believe it is worth it.


3. Extract Geospatial data from Aeronautical data - I know that AIXM is an extension of GML however geospatial data is very bulky and can cause bottlenecks in a system. I would like to see pilots where non-geospatial data in AIXM format are serviced through a XML based service. Each element in the non-geospatial message can be mapped to geo-spatial AIXM element or message.

I think AIXM can be used as cutting edge standard. Since AIXM has just introduced the concept of time or temporality in its standard, I believe this offers the biggest promise. With temporality, I envision AIXM capturing some of the aeronautical business processes and eventually aviation systems will be using AIXM instead of BPEL and BPM. The problem with BPEL and BPM is that it is too generic and sometimes it cannot be modeled well for a specific domain like aviation. I might be dreaming but entities like AIXM should consider this option after all a BPEL file is nothing more than an XML file.

Visual Navigation

Yesterday I met an ex-colleague of mine at BullFeathers, which is in Capitol Hill. I didn't know BullFeathers is a burger joint where politicians met and discussed politics. My burger was good but the ambiance was mundane. However my conversation with Ren Pope, my ex-colleague, was very interesting. Whenever Ren Pope and I have casual discussions, the main focus of our conversation revolves around the data domain. I don't know alot of people like myself or Ren who really enjoy talking about data and its implications in IT. For example when we met yesterday, our discussion revolved around concepts like data density, data weights, "What is metadata?", misuse of data in the public sector and technologies which basically deal with data.

During our conversation, Ren stated that he built a website[http://rensdomain.net] using TheBrain. After visiting the website, I was initially disappointed since I didn't see any fancy graphics, embedded YouTube videos, or even much AJAX functionality. Isn't every website which has been developed in the last year or so, use or abuse AJAX? However after spending a few minutes on the website, I really enjoyed it. The beauty of the website is that it visually renders the information flow from one page to another. Like what Ren did, when you embed TheBrain technology into your website, you don't have to use the "BACK" button or the "FORWARD" button on your browser. Mr. Edward Tuft would be happy with the Brain since it does a good job of visualizing the information flow channels.

I have personally used TheBrain for a long time. It is a good tool for visually organizing information.

Can EA ever work?

A few months ago, I was sitting with my supervisor, who is an Enterprise Architect (eArchitect), and Gartner consultants discussing on how to sell the concept of Enterprise Architecture (EA) to our organization's senior management and how to create a successful EA in our enterprise.

Before we talk about whether EA can work, lets define the term Enterprise Architecture.

the description of the current and/or future structure and behavior of an organization's processes, information systems, personnel and organizational sub-units, aligned with the organization's core goals and strategic direction

- Wikipedia

To capture the true essence of EA, Microsoft.com states the following about EA: "For the first time there is a methodology to encompass all of the various IT aspects and processes into a single practice.

Processes
As you can see, capturing every process and nuance in an enterprise is a daunting task. An enterprise can have mature documented processes which are known and recognized by the enterprise's resources. These processes are easy to document. There are other processes which are well known but no one has documented. There are also processes which exist but they are known by the select few. And lastly there are processes that no one is aware of but they do exist.

Resources
So who do you work for? What do you do? What projects are you working? What is your skillset? These are the typical questions an eArchitect has when he is tackling the resource view in the overall EA. The questions might be simple ones to answer however they are quite hard to ask. eArchitects don't want to invade in someone's space however they need to collect the information to complete their model and render different views of the EA to their management folks. It would be alot easier if the eArchitects went to the Enterprise's Human Resources (HR) Manager. The HR Manager might even be cooperative to share his or her information however their information might not tell the actual picture. For example, my official title in the enterprise I work for is "Computer Specialist" but my functional title is "SOA Technical Lead". Our Enterprise's HR Manager does not capture our functional titles. Therefore just going to the HR Manager and getting information from them does not give the real picture. There needs to be actual discussions between the EA team and low level managers.

Assets
What operating system is running on your operating system? Do we have licenses for this software? How come we have four versions of Microsoft Word? As you can see, assets are a big deal in an EA. Capturing assets in an EA is important since it shows an enterprise view on what, where and how did the enterprise obtain these assets. This information may be great for asset inventories however eArchitects need to make data calls with various groups to capture this information. Without understanding an enterprise's business processes, eArchitects will not be able to infer why certain assets are higher than others.

Application
eArchitects have to spend time with enterprise applications to determine if the applications are meeting some critical requirements in the enterprise. eArchitects have to work with application Subject Matter Experts (SME)s to obtain this information. (Once again eArchitects are doing a data call)

As you can see for a successful EA, eArchitects have to capture lots of information and then synthesize the information. This becomes extremely hard when other groups don't see immediate rewards in sharing their group's information. If there is no information, there is no EA and when there is no EA then the enterprise cannot be improved. For organizations to get a better view of their enterprise, they need to mandate their internal groups to share their information. If the internal groups don't share their information then the consequences are, frankly speaking, dire.

In summary, EA can work however EA will not work with extremely bright and talented eArchitects, buying the state of the art EA software nor simply creating numerous EA models. EA will work if the upper management take time and creates policy which will give power to the EA teams to capture their organizations critical information. The upper management should also investigate ways on how to automatically capture some of the EA information in their processes.

SOA from a human perspective

A few months ago I switched jobs. For my new job, I take the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority Train (Metro) to go to my work location. Everyday it is a different experience. I get on a different train, a different car, sit on a different seat, sit next different people. Sometimes I get an announcement on the Metro that states the the train is delayed for some sort of reason. When my train is delayed then I usually send an email to my boss or call my wife that I will be late for dinner. I also see Metro law enforcement agents, who look for suspicious activities, people or items, get into the Metro and get off the Metro. Why are my observations about Metro interesting?

Well, let's say that I am a XML message and I am sent as a response message from the service providing application. All I, as the XML message, do is sit still in a ESB process (the train) and ride the ESB (Metro equivalent in a SOA environment). I might ride the ESB process with other XML entities who join me during the process. An system owner or an enterprise owner would be comfortable if some sort security mechanisms would be implemented in the ESB where my (as an XML message), fidelity is not altered and copies of myself are covertly created and sent to shady destinations. To address this issue, the system owners should enforce polices of having security agents who act as listeners in the ESB and then call other agents who take care of the corrupt XML individual. As an innocent XML message, I don't want to be tampered with and I would be happy if security controls like agents were implemented on the ESB. I would be upset if my train (the ESB process) is significantly delayed if every security agent is "frisking" every XML message. My owner, the system, would then have to send notices to his customers that I arrived late to the appropriate destination because i was frisked way too many times. Security in the ESB and in the enterprise have to appropriate implemented without significantly slowing down the system.

In airports, we are asked to take off our jackets, shoes, pocket change, cellphones, etc, and etc. This is very inconvenient however we do this because we want to be sure that there are no bad guys on the plane. Even if they are in the plane then they are stripped off of their potential weapons at the airport. This way we know we can reach our destination without much trouble. Using this example, I would like to argue how binary XML is a bad technologies for ESB centric solutions. Since SOA systems are based on distributed archtiectures where trust plays an important role between stakeholders and their systems. If binary XML or even compressed XML is sent across an ESB then rogue agents might sent encrypted viruses and other malicious malware through the ESB. If the ESB decides to decrypt the message then it could possibly infect the whole middleware infrastructure. If it doesn't then the service consumer may be "hosed". This model could bring an enterprise if the malware message sent to several destinations if the message is sent in publish/subscribe model.

Therefore binary XML is a dangerous technology and it should be used in a minimal basis. If you don't think so then please comment to my post.