As my esteemed colleague noted, Danny Sabbah’s comments at last week’s Rational Conference have rubbed a few folks the wrong way, none apparently more so than the always-worth-reading Ryan Tomayko. Here’s what Danny said that ticked a few people that I’ve spoken with off:
“If you look at the history of LAMP development, they’re really primative tools … the so-called good enough model. The type of businesses being created around those particular business models are essentially going to have to grow up at some point.
“I believe that in the same way that some of those simple solutions are good enough to start with, eventually, they are going to have to come up against scalability,” Sabbah said during a press conference at the IBM Rational User Conference in Las Vegas.
Having actually been at that press conference, I can say that the quote wasn’t taken out of context; it’s what was said. Those words were what led me to write the following:
I’m not sure that I concur entirely with his view of the technologies as primarily good enough, as I’m seeing some fairly sophisticated solutions built from the likes of PHP, but I think we agree more than we disagree.
To throw in a bit more context, Danny is, as James noted, a coder by trade rather than a marketer. Danny’s also been a driver of open source within IBM, and a notable supporter of Rod Smith’s push for PHP support. He even went as far as saying, in the press conference, that PHP 5’s support for OO development might be unnecessary, because that’s not what PHP’s been about. Given all this, I think it’s safe to say that the comments were not based out of a lack of technical understanding, or an inability to properly comprehend the value that makes languages like PHP so popular.
So how do we reconcile the the disconnect between Sabbah and LAMP advocates? By understanding that, to a certain extent, they’re both right. Are there cases where PHP doesn’t scale as well as, say, Java? You bet. But are there volumes of businesses that will a.) have their needs satisfactorily met by LAMP based solutions, and b.) are unlikely to ever see the sort of scaling requirements that would drive them off the platform? Yes again. It comes down to what lens one uses to view application development. My colleague said it better here than I could have here:
Its important to understand when IBM talks about scale, it really means something different from the rest of us. Danny, when he thinks about scale, thinks about the requirements of the biggest IT shops in the world. The top 20, say. When IBM bought Informix it initially classified Sears as a medium-sized customer… When IBM thinks of scale it thinks of problems nobody else can solve, where TPF and IMS-like models come in.
Exactly. In any event, I think continuing to characterize PHP and even Gluecode as mere on ramps to more scaleable solutions is not a great messaging strategy for IBM. What’s the alternative? Easy: different tools for different jobs. It’s just that simple.
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