Simon wrote the other day about how companies writing internal web-apps that only work in IE “is inexusable and short-sighted”. Although I agree with many of his points, I think that the main issue is something he hardly touched upon — the reason that companies don’t realise that they’re being short-sighted.
Many of the biggest companies hire the best people straight out of university. Hell, as Joel noted just the other day, a lot of the best people go for internships when they’re still at school and tend to get permanent offers. The main result of this is that a lot of the big companies (with the biggest corporate intranets and so the biggest targets for a change of corporate browser) have very smart IT people who have been in the corporation’s IT dept since they left school. Unless the company happens to be a technology one, it’s quite likely that the measure of how good those IT people are will lie in how well they supply the rest of the business with what they need, rather than how aware they are of the outside tech world.
Now, I’m not saying that these people, who are IT professionals after all, are unaware of what’s going on outside the corporations where they have worked since graduation. I’m just saying that it’s not a prerequisite for success. Many won’t be able to reel off the latest developments in the open source world, or the state of standards on the web or any of that stuff. They spend their days building great solutions to complex business problems fast. They may spend their evenings reading Slashdot, but in reality they don’t need to so many won’t.
Where am I going with this? Well, basically I’m just trying to get you to imagine stepping back from the tech world (particularly the open-source developments of late) that you know so well. No, a little further. Further. Turn around, take 20 steps and then turn back. There! Now you’re at about the right distance. Tell me what you see — what does the web look like to you? What do you think the advantages of web applications are? What does the picture tell you the web-app should be built in?
These are the basic questions that the IT professional will ask when looking at developing a new internal application. The web probably looks like a central repository of information to them — the corporate internet even more so. And what’s the advantage of a web app? Well, Simon reckons the beauty is freedom from a specific platform. I would argue that to a corporate IT bod, the key advantage to a web application is not that it frees employees from a specific platform (remember, the big corps we’re talking about here probably have standard hardware, OS, etc because they’re so big anything else is insupportable), but rather that it frees the employee from a specific machine. People can play less email attachment tennis and potentially not have to drag their laptop absolutely everywhere!
When you distil the advantage of a web app down from giving platform-independency to machine-independency, does this make it clearer why so many corporate IT depts didn’t think to develop for anything but IE? It’s all about frames of references, filters to help you work out what’s changeable and what’s not. I can tell you right now that most of those IT people would never even get to the layer of abstraction needed to see the advantages of web standards development, or cross-browser portability. Those dimensions aren’t where they were looking for change. It’s perfectly human when trying to identify likely areas of change to assume that some things are stable — the difference in what you see lies in the 20 steps between the average corporate IT guy and the “state of the web” view that many students, open-source developers and other people who’s blogs I am likely to read have.
This is why a paradigm shift and various other big changes are needed before we’re ever going to see the pleasant sight of Firefox on the corporate desktop. It’s also why campaigns like SpreadFirefox are so essential. Raising the flag, getting on the radar — this is the first step before the rational arguments can be any good to anyone.
January 29th, 2005 at 1:12 PM
Meri
I agree with some sentiments to promote standards compliance to a state when the IE vs Firefox debate has no cannon fodder. The browser is cross-functional, endowed with the ability to deliver technologies, say xmlhttprequest and a flashpaper document within a real-time reporting environment or embedded codebase. We can quote many other examples. As an enabler of emerging improvements to web applications, and the way we interact with them, a given browser requires critical mass to drive a focus on particular improvements. I see IE’s dominance as an opportunity to beta test such concepts in a way that doesn’t belittle great ideas. In other words, the dominance of IE is enough to justify the deployment of browser-specific components to deliver a richer end user service. The supporting infrastructure that enables mass-market applications to interwork at a baseline - Windows, Office, Outlook, .NET, IE specific addons are also reasons for this dominance. The holy grail of progress is available - now, and standards compliance should not apply universally. Some standards have drawbacks that don’t come from corporate/M$ ambitions - of which surprisingly little is written. Consortia that develop these often end up diluting excellent proposals or RFC’s to satisfy the masses, but don’t recognise this until the standard has large take-up.
To turn this around on its head - I hold the opinion that as important as HTML/CSS compliance is to a browser, several initiatives (some semantic web proposals I know) that could easily be spearheaded in the OS domain are by nature, individual concerns that are trying to find common ground for a standard. Web services in particular have many faults, namely inefficient transport and security; and the frightening ability to launch a DOS attack on a web service far more easily than on a major dot com. Furthermore, the effects of such an attack could cripple a firm’s middleware as well as its public facing web resource. One open argument is that creating a closed “standard” makes the workings of a web service opaque to the outside world, enhancing security and takeup. These remain nice areas to read in the future.
However, I diverge to comment on something else you touched on. I work for a systems integration consultancy - Atos Origin, and we have clients of all sorts, needing efficiencies that could be delivered in a TIBCO powered portal to a SAP middleware framework to reduce costs in a manufacturing supply chain. This doesn’t fit me into the corporate bod cupboard. Indeed, my work here is a mix of TIBCO, systems integration and strategy, driving some of the many things which we have under incubation. This is a very far cry from the corporate IT department, as our business is IT services. The point I am making is that we’re not “go with the flow” or taking a view “20 steps back”. We are acutely aware, and we have clientele because of our discretion. It’s a rare thing to step between the worlds of open source, academia and delivering cost-savings at blue chips - but such a stage exists.
Graduates are in high demand in my kind of firm, since our edge and stated position on emerging tech drives white paper assets in Technical Consulting. If you know anybody who’s a real doer and teamworker, harnessing ideals like those of Multi Agent Systems, the semantic web or certain standards bodies, please send me a referral
My company is always recruiting into the right areas.
My apologies if I repeated some of your points, but hopefully this encourages some debate.
January 30th, 2005 at 2:30 AM
Hey Meri, I’ve already commented on this article (on Simon’s site) so I won’t re-write it here. Just wanted to let you know that your new site design is looking great. There’s a minor issue - on my IE6 SP2 install the articles overflow off the right-hand side of the page [screenshot].
January 30th, 2005 at 11:28 PM
Chris, thanks for the heads-up on the overflow. I’m afraid I can’t take any credit for the new design as it’s all Elly’s work
She’ll have a look at fixing the overflow problem when she gets time. It’s something strange about how IE handles orders and margins, but we need to find the IE-specific hack in order to sort it out, as the CSS is right according to the specs! :-\
Amit, the sort of graduates you describe are out there, but they typically already have jobs lined up in large firms, earning shedloads of money and are unlikely to apply to the sort of consultancy that would hire anyone with a degree classification below a 2:1. As I mentioned in my article, just about all of the really great developers have already been recruited by much bigger fish