While the current WebObjects pricing is reasonable when compared to Kiva,
Netdynamics, Oracle and other comparable products, I do think that Apple is
making a huge mistake in not allowing developers to download a 30-day trial
of the development package for free. Not only should they do this, but they
should hire someone like Razorfish or Agency.com or Organic to come in and
create a slick WebObjects site which will present more information about the
product and entice developers to try it out.
The WOF sales team has been very successful in targeting companies which are
large and have been large for awhile and therefore have large and well-run
IT deptartment. In such places there is a process is place for evaluating
and selecting new technologies, etc. WOF has been a tremendous success in
this segment.
However on the Internet a lot of the companies that are already or are
becoming giants or least very large like Amazon, EarthWeb, The Globe,
Tripod, Beyond.com, Razorfish, various large ISPs and a few hundred other
companies do not or at least until recently did not have this sort of
infrastructure in place.
In fact I can say from first and second hand knowledge of a few dozen of
them that the way most of these companies built up their technology
infrastructure was that they hired some relatively young and adventurous
computer geeks who were willing to work 80 hours a week for low pay and a
lot of options. By and large the techology they are using is whatever the
original team either rolled together themselves or decided to download and
check out at 3am. There was no formal process in place to evaluate
technology and some cases it wouldn't have even been clear who to make the
pitch to if Apple/NeXT had targeted them.
Case in point. Over the past summer I spent a few months consulting at one
of the ten largest web consulting companies in the country. They have
nearly 400 employees, offices in major cities and Fortune 400 clients. They
are 4 or 5 years old. Their middleware layer, which they use for almost all
their projects (except when the customer insists on something else, like
ASP), is something which their original team of engineers wrote from scratch
using Java 1.0. The original team of programmers who wrote the software
have *all* since left the company. But the company started using this stuff
and there is basically no way to get off of it and onto something better
without something standing up and seriously rocking the boat.
Now, the head of the engineering deptartment in NYC is 25 years old. He's
very smart but he's up to his ears just keeping all the current projects
going and his superiors were once told that this software layer which was
written 3 years ago is a competitive advantage. In fact the company's
strategic business plan even says so. So there is no way this guy is going
to stand up and try to change things. And as far as I know from him on up
no one is even aware that this is a problem. Meanwhile most of their
projects take months longer than they should and end up in unmaintable
spaghetti code which is going to cost the client millions of dollars down
the road.
Now this is not just some random web design company, this is a company which
won't even think about accepting a client unless they have at least a
million dollars to spend. And it is one of dozens in this category. And
almost none of them are using WebObjects, or AFAIK, have been targetted by
Apple. From what I've heard the only reason USWeb uses it is because one of
the companies they acquired was already doing so.
