[Catalyst] RFC: The paradox of choice in web development

[Robert L Cochran]

>> The fact is that Oracle does not try to compete for the low end of
>> the market with MySQL.  They don't want it.  They never did.  Why do we?
>
> The comparison is good, but not very exact. I know companies which
> don't use PostgreSQL but Oracle, because Oracle is better known
> (because it offers discounts to the software companies that distribute
> it, so they have the interest of promoting it), and because Oracle
> offers tech support.
> The big companies usually want to pass the responsability to others,
> even if they need to pay some more.
>
> Octavian
>

Well said. Availability of support, tons of free documentation, very
flexible pricing options, plus extremely good education and
certification programs, is what puts Oracle ahead. There is a huge mass
of getting-started type documentation in favor of Oracle, and they make
it freely available on the web. They have excellent formal certification
programs. I can speak from actual experience -- I've taken several
Oracle University classes.

In my company, the selection of programming languages is determined by
what is specified in our Enterprise Architecture. That specification
does not include perl or perl-ish frameworks. It does include .NET and
Sun Java. For frameworks at Tier B, we use Rational Application
Developer and various Rational tools. Yes, they cost a lot of money, but
there are a lot of people trained in their use and there are a heck of a
lot of free tutorial resources available. That means an applications
programmer faced with a deadline can get support fast. And while we are
relatively small customers to IBM (which markets the Rational Suite), we
still get fairly good pricing because we already contract for so much
IBM support and we have used IBM mainframes since they were first
produced many years ago. Choices are driven by price and support. We
have a lot of Microsoft and Sun-certified people. We buy heavily into
Sun and IBM equipment. We don't have any perl people.  Large enterprises
want new projects to follow the Enterprise Life Cycle. I'm not sure how
perl fits in the ELC, because so many different reviews from different
IT areas are required in the ELC and I'm not sure how perl would pass
scrutiny in these areas.

Without the training, without the documentation, without the tools
needed to educate positive masses of programmers, Catalyst will not go
very far. It is very hard to use right now, unless you have training.

A wise fellow out in California once compared two word processing
products, Microsoft Word and WordPerfect, many years ago. He wrote, in
part: "..it is hard to beat the top quality documentation that is
produced by Microsoft." That is why Microsoft Office is the most widely
adopted officeware platform now. Microsoft provided great documentation
from the start, made Word and other tools very easy to use, and people
bought. I think Microsoft's dominance in the market is testimony to the
effectiveness of their superb documentation. Pricing is certainly
involved too, but Office was never a closely guarded secret made
available only to an elite few. It gained dominance because it was made
available to everyone. Microsoft went one step further when it wanted to
push adotpion of Internet Explorer: it gave the product away for free
(at a time Netscape was charging a lot of money) and it provided a lot
of documentation there, too.

Bob Cochran


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