 Snowballs Down a Mountain
EclipseCon has been a blast this year. I've had a chance to meet people that have frankly been nothing more than a signature or an email for too long. A lot of the folks whose blogs, emails, tutorials or articles structure your decision making in the software industry are here and I have to say meeting them face to face instills confidence in me. Whether they are folks from the big corporations, little framework shops, open source developers or even the marketing companies these people know how to carry themselves in a professional and amicable manner. The mindset of tons of angry closet-programmers that see day light once a year has been replaced with a lot of professional folks that are all driven and have a lot of great ideas culminating in the software arena. For my summary of what has been happening so far you can check out my mash-ups so far here and here, but the point of this column is going to be a little different.
The Tools Market
I have had a great time meeting a lot of different developers this year at EclipseCon, talking to small start-ups as well as more established players in the tools and Eclipse product space. Something that came up quite a few times in sort of programmer buddy-buddy conversation was the reluctant acknowledgement that as cool as open source is and as popular as the Eclipse platform has become, it has become a painful ride for some companies. For them, continuing to push out products and spend lots of money on R&D only to have their product commoditized and assimilated into an open source Eclipse plugin is complicated. While people from some companies shrugged their shoulders as if to say this didn't affect them very much, others took the opportunity to build on top of whatever was coming out of Eclipse, and still others felt surprised by this bulldozing of a once extremely proprietary and profitable space.
Effects on Products
I think most people would agree that for developers the tool space now is fantastic. Tons of free tools are available, even to the point now that when I went digging around for a text editor on my Mac, I laughed and did a double take when the top 2 or 3 editors were all commercial or shareware. Shareware, what's that? $99 for a text editor? Hmm, it's a little hard to stomach that after you see $4000 enterprise IDEs given away for free now.
With that being said and the reality that the software market has become a space where minor innovation with one or two fantastic feature do nothing to increase sales anymore, how does a company even try to compete? There are only two ways: ultra low price with value add or high price with bigger value add (on site support, extremely specialized tooling that fits your companies need, etc). There are only a few players in the ultra low price market and they are all doing well with volume sales increasing as time goes on. But what about the high end market; the enterprise market; the place where you can still sign huge corporate multi-year contracts? How many players are left there? Well with JBuilder dropping out and BEA now giving away their IDE, it seems to me the one big player that is still left is IBM.
No One is Exempt
This is what dawned on me during my time walking around the exhibit hall talking to developers and companies: *everyone* is effected by Eclipse in the tools market. Some to a lesser extent and some to a bigger extend. Some are using this as an opportunity to jump in and others are using it as a reason to go out of business. It is a natural progression and there is nothing wrong with it. If it wasn't IBM that created Eclipse then it would have been some other company with some other platform that did the same thing. There is no path from point A to point C that *doesn't* pass through the point C that we are in right now.
The interesting thing is that Eclipse has grown to such a self-sustaining level that not even its creator is immune to the effects of its consumption abilities in the tools market. Perhaps ironically, IBM is struggling just like everyone else to play the game of huge value add to their products over the free stuff coming out of the Eclipse foundation. This is an incredible litmus test to see in action, an incredible milestone or critical mass that Eclipse has achieved. No one can stop or slow the momentum behind it. As I saw coming up to EclipseCon there are continually more robust and active projects going through the incubation and review process at Eclipse and getting accepted to full project-hood. Each one of these projects represents a commitment by a company (usually an expert in the field) to continue to build and expand that tool; furthering the gap between the starting and finishing line anyone already in that field or thinking about getting into it.
Something in the Water
IBM has started something big, and having EclipseCon almost double in size each year is clear proof. What was IBM's magical combination which allowed them to do what others had been unable to do up until this point? The answer? Money, money, money. They managed to get enterprise companies to commit huge amounts of money and developers all to a central cause with the promise of something big: No more home grown APIs, no more broken update centers that are not compatible across versions. They promised more interoperability, better support, better stability, better speed and more. They also promised users that they would now be able to use their favorite products all at once in the same platform, and no longer be required to have 20 tools all installed separately. The response from both companies and users has been a resounding, "Yes, this is what we need." The rest is history. Big companies signed up to be strategic developers and assigned huge resources to both Eclipse and Eclipse sub projects. Combine that with the incredibly efficient and open manner in which IBM managed the whole project and Bam! it was a match made in heaven. The project, along with the partners and the backing of IBM, instilled confidence in the community enabling the project to go full steam ahead. In the last year the upswing of usage towards critical mass really took hold as more and more companies with seemingly disconnected needs released plugins running the gamut of functionalities ranging from source code editing to genome sequencing.
Conclusion
The most exciting thing about EclipseCon this year was thinking about what EclipseCon will be like next year. I look forward to seeing a handful of Eclipse subprojects that have been trying to find their feet really take off this year and hopefully reach fruition by EclipseCon 2007. I'm excited to see more extension to the RCP (which was huge this year) into other uses, including the web tier which was also big this year. Last, but definitely not least, I'm excited to see what Sun is going to use to combat Eclipse at JavaOne and the rest of the year. I love this competition, but couldn't be happier that I'm not in that pit trying to fight it out with the big boys right now.
If you have gotten this far I want to thank you for reading and look forward to hearing from you on EclipseZone.
Until Next Time,
Riyad Kalla
editors@eclipsezone.com
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