May 01, 2005

A great post and a new Quote of the Day

[UPDATE: I recently receive a pointer to this posting in which the following paragraph makes this situation all the more interesting:

And by the looks of it, many MVPs already signed. Or have they? Wait a minute. There a quite a few MVPs, and surely I don't know all of them. But the Dutch MVP community is not that large and the Dutch names on the list do not seem familiar. Many of the names (Dutch and otherwise) are not listed in the MVP directory. So what's this. A scam? A form of miscommunication, a computer glitch, misjudgement?

DataDirect, the 55% fiasco and now this? What on earth are you doing????!!! 2 years ago this might not even be detected and if it was would have difficulty spreading to the masses. We no longer live in that world. Blogging and Bloggers have completely changed the media landscape. You may want to mention this to whichever firm you hired to develop these last two campaigns. Just a suggestion...]

[original post]

Oleg has done a great job of commenting on the recent "XQuery For All!" campaign and has presented me an opportunity to extend my "The Day in Pictures" post which some of you may have been scratching your heads as to what on earth I was talking about and where did I find the original picture in the first place.

Like Oleg states if this had been last October we would be looking at something quite different. But its not as as such I question why the push when it has to be obvious that its simply too late for anything of this nature to have teeth big enough to bite and latch on for dear life with. Why Obvious? ...

Given the fact that DataDirect/Sonic is in the business of making software they should easily understand how much time and effort goes into making last second changes. There's no such thing as "last second changes" in this business, especially at the very top of the stack, where Microsofts playing field has been mapped out. There are showstoppers and there are product releases. Thats it! You have to choose one or the other (especially at this stage of the game), the prior pushing the release of a product out Yet Another "It is Expected to Release in Quarter 'X' of Year 'Y'" From Now.

Whether we want to admit it or not (and believe me this is not an easy thing for me to admit!) the XML processing pieces, while vital, are only a small portion of the CLI Foundation Class Libraries. While in our world all we think about is XML there are hundreds of other class libraries that, if questioned as to what XML was, would answer "I'm sorry, but all I understand is CIL, could you be more specific?" Microsoft hasn't taken anything away that previously existed and therefore (I'm guessing) hasn't broken any models that couldn't easily adapt to what was already available, given this is what they were using in the first place. Like XSLT, XQuery is a high level language, not a core piece of the CLI foundation. Take away XQuery and you've pissed off a few of your fans and caused a bit more work for your PR team. Take away System.XML... now you've got architectural problems that effect nearly every piece of the framework that doesn't live within the mscorlib.dll assembly.

So boiling things down, my question to DataDirect/Stylus is simply: Why now?

And furthermore: Haven't you been hypin' your own XQuery product, something so great and wonderful that it can be embedded into anything without cause for concern that it may not work as expected? If this is the case, then extend it to work within the .NET framework. Its easy to do. In fact you can see an example of it working right now as part of Saxon.NET (the whole and entire reason for this post), something I have a pretty good understanding of. Obviously I didn't write Saxon and therefore can not claim anything more than the fact that I have hacked a few libraries, added a few bits and pieces, and adjusted the architecture to fit in line with a .NET library as opposed to an executable (separation of the Transform, Query, and Compile classes from the core Saxon package, all of which contain main() methods, Main() speaking in C# terms.) But if its possible to take the resulting compilation of Java Byte-codes, convert them to CIL, develop a run-time that manages the execution of this code and its interaction with the compiled Gnu Classpath project libraries (that have been converted to CIL as well), then shouldnt it be possible to something similar with your implementation? "If there's a will there's a way" but I don't think you need to be told this. So again, Why now? What's really going on behind the scenes that we are unaware of? Is this a marketing ploy to bring attention to the fact that you will be providing support for XQuery on the .NET platform as part of your XQuery offerings?

I'm all for "Carpe Diem" but it annoys the hell out of me when political campaigns precede marketing campaigns so if this turns out to be the case you will have done a nice job or alienating someone whos happens to be a fan of one of your core profit making products in Stylus Studio. I can't speak for anybody else. But I can speak for myself when I suggest that since I do a majority of my XML devwork in Oxygen anyway and since I haven't pony'd up the 5 Benjamin's n ecessary to license Stylus for the pieces I have found it useful for, at that point (if it turns out that this is a preceding political campaign) I will most certainly NOT be relieving my five little compadre's of their "sit in my bank account" duty to make such an acquisition.

If, however, I am incorrect in my thought process and in a reasonable amount of time from now it can be seen that this has just been me being a little too "Conspiracy Theory"'ish then I will most certainly follow-up this post with an apology for thinking out loud that there's more to this than meets the eye. But after the "55% of developers are already using XQuery" fiasco I'm taking a "wait and see" approach to this one. So, I guess we'll wait and see.

Oh, BTW... the new "Quote of the Day" comes from Oleg:

"Small advice for StylusStudio - one gotta read blogs in this century to be informed early."

I'll post that now.