From the Editors: Cloud? Mobile? We get it
By SD Times Editorial Board
July 1, 2010 —
(Page 1 of 2)
Microsoft talks about Azure and the cloud at its TechEd conference. Apple talks about the iPhone and the App Store at its Worldwide Developers Conference. We have dutifully covered these events and given them prominent play in this newspaper, but pardon us if we can’t get too worked up over them.
To paraphrase the Will Ferrell character Mugatu from the ridiculous 2001 movie "Zoolander:" “Cloud? Mobile? They’re the same story. Doesn't anybody notice this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!”
Indeed, if you only listened to Microsoft, Apple and many other companies, it would seem that all developers care about are building cloud applications and building mobile applications. However, to our eyes, cloud computing is only peripherally a developer issue, and mobile is more about a changing platform target (with a different business model and distribution vehicle) than a new programming paradigm.
No question, companies like Microsoft and Apple are businesses. It’s their job to come up with shiny new toys, both literally and figuratively, to keep the money flowing in. That’s why the hype machine, not only from their PR agencies but also from their pet analyst firms, keeps pounding the same message over and over and over again: It’s cheaper to develop applications for the cloud than it is to build out your data center. And you need your applications to behave as well on a mobile device as they will on a desktop.
OK. We get it.
We can’t help but notice, though, that things that are so critical to development organizations, such as the future of Java, leveraging multicore systems, quality assurance, intellectual property rights, and improving development team productivity, get much shorter shrift these days. Could it simply be that Oracle doesn’t yet have a plan for Java? That only hardware vendors are discussing multicore? Nobody knows how to improve software quality? IP and software rights are an open-source issue without major players behind it? And that developer productivity is, well, boring to the big guys?
Related Search Term(s): cloud computing, mobile development
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