Founders at Work.pdf

Philip Greenspun 339
paid my monthly fee. I want my site up and running.” We had a lot of cost efficiencies
from running the AOLserver version internally for our hosted customers,
and if the team was on vacation and there was a problem with the
customer’s site, any other programmer could go and maintain it because all the
files were in the same places; everything was named conventionally. It was very
easy for programmer A to debug programmer B’s work.
So what was the problem? We were making money, customers were happy,
people were using this. Well, with any big system, people write down a list of
things that they don’t like, that they could do better. It gets to be a long list. The
biggest problem with our system was the same problem with SAP: you have
data models, some customizations, and some scripts to talk to the data models.
When you upgrade from one version to the next, you have all this SQL stuff
that has to be done in Oracle to migrate the old data model to the new one—if
you add columns to the tables, for example. If you are setting up a brand new
system, it’s easy. You just create tables. But in an existing running system, you
have to alter the tables. That’s kind of a pain.
If there have been customizations done to it that haven’t been rolled back
into the toolkit, you may have to recustomize a bit. This is a problem for SAP,
and it was a problem for us. My attitude as an engineer was that SAP is a company
with billions of dollars in assets and lots of smart people. They had never
solved this problem, so we’re not going to attack it either. Not until we have
infinite money. We’ll just leave it, and, if customers have to spend 2 weeks of
hard programming upgrading the server, then that’s the cost. So that was one of
the biggest things.
The second thing we didn’t like about it was that it wasn’t the full Java 2,
Enterprise Edition. At the time, some of these people thought that it would be
cool if they had multiple layers of Java in there. They said it was a little too slow;
they had all these criticisms of the system. That’s true of any first system. It’s
new, so it’s kind of got some ugliness to it. Shortcuts have been taken. So then
you say, “OK, my next system, the second system, is going to fix all these problems
at once. It will be upgradeable instantly, it will be super fast, it will all be
J2EE, and it will be fabulous. And it will be ready real soon.”
But a lot of those problems with the first system aren’t there because the
people who built the first system are dumb, they’re there because it’s kind of a
difficult challenge and there are compromises involved, and that was an
inevitable result of one of the compromises. And the people doing the second
system are just too naïve; they haven’t worked on this problem before, and
they’re young, maybe, and they just don’t realize that it was hard.
Fred Brooks said that the second system is always late; sometimes years
later than you expect. And in fact, because of the ambition, usually it won’t
solve any of the problems. They’ve got a long list of things, and it will solve
almost none of them in the end. So that’s exactly what happened with these
guys. They told customers, “Don’t use the old system, because we have a new
one that should be shipping in 3 months and it will be better.” It actually took
them more than a year and a half.