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Software Companies Love to Spend Money

By Matt Stephens
September 30, 2001

At a company I visited recently, a project manager was boasting proudly about their extensive budget for cutting-edge software tools.

They had just spent over twenty thousand UK pounds to kit the entire programming team out with the latest shiny new JBuilder Enterprise Edition (Java development environment). Why? Perhaps more to the point, why not just use something like Forte for Java instead? It's just as good, and the entry-level edition is free (and to be brutally honest, it's all you need, even for enterprise development).

Don't get me wrong (and please don't flame me), JBuilder is a great product, with the biggest swinging feature list in town. True, some may regard it as greedy bloatware, but not me. Well alright, guilty as charged.

To be frank, how many of those "enterprise" features will you really end up using? EJB support? Templates that make half-decent guesses at the class structure you are aiming for, but require hacky re-working that may take as much time as writing a clear, well designed program from scratch? (pause for breath) Okay... now how much of that could you have got elsewhere, for free (or at least substantially cheaper)?

Many people still develop Java using UltraEdit and a command-line build tool - and good luck to them. (Personally I think they're taking things to the other extreme, but at least they're being pragmatic).

Even in this hostile economy, many software companies are still corporate spendthrifts, blowing oversized wads of cash on over-priced software. And they encourage their customers to be the same. Why? Because it gives them an air of authenticity.

Similarly, a company I worked at insisted on using Rational ClearCase for its version control, which again costs untold thousands for developer licenses. Again, why? There's always CVS, which is free, and surprisingly easy to set up and maintain. Five hundred thousand* on-line open-source projects can't be wrong.
(* made-up statistic, but you get the point!)

Oh right, you're using the Rational Unified Process (RUP) so your manager insists that you have to use ClearCase? In some ways, RUP is simply a snare-all that encourages you to use separate, barely integrated Rational products for every aspect of your development lifecycle. I'm surprised they don't have a Rational Coffee Break (RCB) best practice.

Just kidding - I actually think RUP has a lot going for it. It's based on genuinely good, well-proven practices. And of course you can tailor it to follow exactly the process you want, and use whichever software you prefer. The only thing RUP has going against it is its cost - that and you really need a company filled with RUP experts to get the best from it. At a bare minimum, you need one evangelical RUP expert and unequivocal buy-in from everyone else in the company.

J2EE afficionados love to recommend Weblogic or Websphere, which cost megabucks (depending on the deal you strike, Weblogic costs around UK£18,000). But how often is Weblogic overkill? Sure, it implements all the J2EE APIs. Do they all have to be in one big box? What if two modules are good but one (the one your project happens to rely on) is crap?

Integration of this type is rarely a good thing. That's why you don't see so many TV-video combos around these days. Or combined car-refrigerators (remember when they were all the rage?)

Okay, you might say, I'll use Weblogic (with its half-baked web server) for JSP and EJB, but for my queuing I'll also plug in IBM's MQSeries and use its JMS wrapper. Ouch, see those license costs soar! Top management will love you.

Project managers appear to be obsessed with the principle that to get good quality software you must pay through your nose. This is of course utter rubbish. Not all good software is free, and of course not all free software is good. But it definitely pays to shop around, look for less insanely expensive alternatives, and if you find a superior product that happens to be free, don't be afraid to use it. What's wrong, scared your boss might laugh at ya??

Above all, never fall into the trap of "partnering" with a vendor of expensive server software. You don't really benefit, and the vendor will be laughing all the way to their Aspen ski lodge. Remember, the most popular software is rarely the best of breed - but it is invariably the most expensive. Such products usually become no.1 for a variety of reasons (first to market, unusually effective sales team, decent partner network) that have very little to do with the quality of the product. Their leading position is then propagated by unscrupulous developers who are over-keen to add that product to their resume, regardless of whether they have used the product commercially, e.g. for a successful EJB project that actually scales to more than three concurrent users.

Companies that recommend expensive products generally do so because it makes themselves look expensive and "posh". Why not recommend a perfectly good open-source EJB server such as JBoss? Because consultancies are afraid of coming out smelling of cheap wine (figuratively speaking). They feel that if they recommend a much more expensive product such as Weblogic, then some of that expensiveness will rub off on them (like vintage wine on an expensive suit)...

It's all about image. If a product is expensive, then it must be well supported, right? Maybe, maybe not. Having paid through your nose is no guarantee of getting a satisfactory answer to your technical question or urgent show-stopper bug report. In fact the open source crowd often prove themselves to be ahead of the game when it comes to free support, swift and satisfactory bug fixes, and just plain coming up with the goods. But for our spendthrift corporate friends, that's not enough.

When you're in the corporate game, free just doesn't cut it. Crazy, huh?

Talkback - Have Your Say:

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SwiftMQ - Free JMS
Dino Fancellu 
I agree with Dino
Jerason Banes 

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