While paging through a software industry mag, I came across an ad for Oracles middleware product.  The ads buy line was that by using their middleware product, application integration was hot pluggable.  Hot pluggable?  The inference is that you can plug-in applications to their integration bus as easily as one can plug-in a hot swappable hard drive into a computer without powering down or effecting other applications. I have been building application integration solutions for 5 years and my experience can attest that application integration is not hot pluggable.  In fact, it is an incredibly complex rats nest that you have to make sense of many different vendor applications proprietary data formats, using (mostly) proprietary APIs.  Most vendors middleware products also work at this complex level of abstraction, i.e. too low.  Also, while the middleware vendors help manual is 10,000 pages (talk about complexity!), no-where does it tell you in detail how to solve the actual application integration problem, which in itself, is just as complex as the vendors toolset.

 

No wonder software developers are a cynical bunch when it comes to working with most vendors products.  What the data sheet says and the marketecture talks about, makes no sense in the real world.  While one could say that for any type of advertising, our software industry seems the most plagued in my opinion.  Why?  As discussed in previous posts software development is a complete mystery to almost everyone but the programmers.  So who are the ads targeted for?  Decision makers, who are CIOs or purchasing agents, most of whom dont (really) understand software development (generalization) so all they have to go on is the marketecture.

 

I am not just picking on Oracle, I saw a Microsoft Office cartoon ad where the people in the ad had dinosaur heads on their bodies.  Dinosaur heads?  Huh?  Is MSFT inferring that their users are dinosaurs?  The buy line is that one dinosaur accidentally forwarded everyones salary to the entire company and had the dinosaur evolved to using Information Rights Technology in MS Office, then this would not have happened.  I suppose that it also means that one of the dinosaurs in the ad is about to become extinct. 

 

As an industry professional, I find this dinosaur ad - embarrassing.  And insulting to the user community it is targeted at.  Anyone that knows me personally wont accuse me for not having a sense of humor, but honestly this is lame.  Not only is the ad just plain dumb, but it deals with laying FUD on the target audience. This is unacceptable.  Do the marketing people for these companies know no bounds?  Why not say that by using our product you can prevent sensitive information from being read by unauthorized readers using Information Rights Technology and here is how easy it is to do it.  Right now you might be thinking, what a naive software programmer maybe so.  But then again, "All Marketers Are Liars".

 

Both ads remind me of an old Dudley Moore movie called, Crazy People where he was an alcoholic adman and came up with his best ads while being institutionalized at an insane asylum. Dudley had the inmates create ads that told it like it was i.e. the truth.  How is that for irony.  Maybe the marketing people in the software industry can learn a lesson from this?  My cynical programmer persona says I doubt it.  However, eventually customers will push back with another cycle of what happened in the dot com era and want demand software products that do exactly what the marketing materials says it does.  This would help the industrialization of software, but until then, would you like fries with your SOA?