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by James Robertson.
Original Post: The Cycle
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James comments on issues in the tool developers space. The comments seem to indicate that Eclipse domination is imminent. Maybe it is, I dunno. It is the defacto standard. But I hear increasing amounts of rumbling about how heavy it is. And how other tools are lighter. Not that I can name any, cause frankly I don't care that much.
It seems to me that there is this cycle. And it applies to this space as well as any. Given a domain (bus architectures, chip design, programming language, IDE, desktops, etc), everyone looks around and bemoans the heterogeneity. The pressure is on, to find the one solution that "in the darkness binds them." We spend a number of years iterating towards that. Huge competitive cash troves are tossed around. Unbelievable marketing hype. With much pain and lost fortune, a standard emerges. It picks up momentum and we all get there (or enough of us to constitute a super majority). Having gotten there, the bliss lasts for about a month.
Then people start looking around and muttering "This Sucks!" No one has a competitive advantage. So everyone goes off to their closets, holds their cards a little closer, and begins to figure out how to "brew a secret sauce." And we head back the other direction. And slowly entropy takes over the space until it seems chaos reigns. At that point, everyone looks around and... goto sentence 3, paragraph 2. Wash, rinse, repeat.
The Eclipse tool space is on the march to oneness right now. It'll change. The Smalltalk tool space was there 5 years ago. Camp Smalltalk promoted cross platform libraries. Smalltalk/X did Squeak and VW protocols. Interchange formats were everywhere. And things got closer. And after getting closer, no one seemed to care and we've wandered apart for a while.
The other aspect of this is the open source/free one. I don't see this as a cycle. Or maybe it is. Any sufficiently complex process involves any number of middle-men to help get the job done. Software development/deployment is no different. As time goes on though, the ends of the process use technology to automate away the middlemen. What open source encourages, is for the end solution providers to "co-op" where possible rather than relying on a middle man (OS provider, IDE provider, etc). I think survival of a tool space company is figuring this out, and how to make money in this evolved land scape.
Banks don't employ near as many tellers today as they did 25 years ago, but they're still in business.
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