Matthias and the SAP Universe

November 10, 2005

SAP slams Open Source and Oracle

UPDATE: Clearly Shai's comments were taken out of context. He provides a much more balanced view in the disucssion (Here is the recording, Open Source discussion starts at 35:30) then reported by Vnunet. I encourage you to judge for yourself.

Seems it is the big "SAP stirring controversy" week. On Wednesday Shai Agassi was speaking at the Churchill Club in Silicon Valley. Unfortunately I missed this event (there is so much going on right now), but apparently he made some pretty bold statements.
"Open source will fail to deliver innovation and is more likely to break applications, according to Shai Agassi, president of the product and technology group at SAP."
I am wondering if these statements were taken out of context. In general SAP is supporting Open Source Software and was very early on supporting SAP applications on Linux. Also there are a number of initiatives in the SAP Developer Network around Open Source projects.
"Open source is great for debugging, but it's crucial not to touch [the code]," said Agassi.
Clearly not the best day for Shai. Here is some feedback...

Jeff Nolan, SAP Ventures, Venture Chronicles: Open Source is no silver bullet to be sure, but open source is less about software and code, and more about a new development process that is highly collaborative and social in it's roots. I'm no open source zealot to be sure, but it does strike me that this is possibly one of the best proposals for unleashing developer productivity, developing new applications (Firefox), and creating a new class of infrastructure technology (too many to list).

Dave Rosenberg: SAP's Shai Agassi was at the Churchill Club making very bold and ill-informed statements about open source.
"Open source will fail to deliver innovation and is more likely to break applications"
Wow. That's about as bad FUD as you can get.
"We all talk about how great Linux is, but if you look at the most innovative desktop today, Microsoft's Vista is not copying Linux, it is copying Apple."
It's true that Vista is copying Apple, but that's on the UI, not the system architecture.
"Intellectual property [IP] socialism is the worst that can happen to any IP-based society," he said. "And we are an IP-based society. If there is no way to protect IP, there is no reason to invest in IP."
The thing that strikes me is that SAP could have taken the high road and embraced open source products. Instead, Agassi calls it "IP Socialism."
Can SAP possibly be so naive as to think that open source products won't eventually match up to their offerings, or is this just an attempt to sway public opinion? Either way-I now equate SAP with MS.
I find this extremely disappointing. Agassi was one of my fave tech execs and now I think he's a fool.

Update 1:
It was just a matter of hours and the story is all over the Internet... see comments on Slashdot, Cnet and SDN.
Lets see what SAP will/can do for damage control.

In my opinion the best comments on this topic can be found on Silent Penguin:
E.g. David Welton states: "I would really like to know what the context of his remarks were. I find it hard to believe that this is supposed to be a general remark - especially watching how open source is being used more and more to enhance the usefulness of SAP, or even to make Netweaver a more attractive development platform. Then again, Shai's remarks on PHP being "just for college students" were followed by SAP Ventures' investment in Zend.".

Update 2:
Thanks to ZDnet the discussion with Shai at the Churchill Club as well as a follow up interview is now available online.

Update 3:
You can read Shai's response in his Blog on SDN.

SAP an early adopter of Ajax?

There is a good discussion over at the SAP Developer Network around AJAX and SAP Web Dynpro. Benny Schaich-Lebek, who works in the SAP NetWeaver Product Management team, sparked the discussion with his controversial Blog entry "AJAX @ SAP - an Old Hat!". I know Benny and he is a very knowledgable guy. Unfortunately the use of German "humor" in his Blog did not work out for all readers (read some of the comments).
Basically Benny states that Web Dynpro uses XML communication between server and web client and therefore is leveraging the basic foundation of AJAX. While Web Dynpro developers do not write Java Script the Web Dynpro engine generates Java Script based on the Web Dynpro model which is leveraged on the client.
Benny's Blog trigerred also a more detailed response by Daniel McWeeny. Unfortunately Daniel has not all the facts straight (see Benny's comment to Daniels Blog).

However I think the whole discussion misses an important point. AJAX has become the buzz word du jour because Google, Flickr and others use it for innovative new web based applications with rich client user interfaces. So this is not about the technology but about improved user experience on the web. And I think this is where Web Dynpro falls short. Web Dynpro UIs resemble pretty much HTML user interfaces. I talked with a number of SAP UI developers who feel that the Web Dynpro UI patterns are very restrictive and do not allow them to provide an innovative new UI experience to customers. Switch over to another development group at SAP working on Visual Composer. They recently integrated the possibility to generate Flex/Flash user interfaces based on Visual Composer models, providing a very rich user experience for Business Analytic Dashboards.

I need to close for today but plan to write a more extensive Blog entry about the disruption rich client UIs will bring to the enterprise software space.

November 09, 2005

Pictures and Video Footage from Vintage Computer Festival

The Vintage Computer Festival last weekend was great! In particular the Homebrew Computer Club retrospective was a lot of fun. Turns out the secret of Apple 1 is that Woz is the fastest hex code typist :-) Even in school Woz could write with a typewriter faster then any of the girls in his class.
I wish I had those skills... I could produce many more blog entries...
If you missed the event Cnet has a number of video clips available. Also there a a lot of pictures on Cnet as well as on Flickr.
I only had my cell phone camera, so unfortunately not the best quality...
Here is the panel and it turned out a couple of old school hackers were in the audience including Captain Crunch.

From left to right: Michael Holley, Steve Wozniak, Allen Baum, Lee Felsenstein and Bob Lash.

BTW they have some really interesting exhibits in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, so if you are in the area stop by and visit it.

Adobe exhibit including Illustrator 1.0.

Original Apple 1

November 02, 2005

More on Computing History

If you are interested in historic (well I guess that means older then 10 years) computer hardware and happen to be in the Bay Area this weekend do not miss the Vintage Computer Festival 8.0 in Mountain View. I will certainly be there. The highlight is the Homebrew Computer Club Retrospective panel discussion Saturday at 1:00pm.
Looking forward I already signed up for the Sun Founder's Panel on January, 11. IMHO this could be one of the best events next year. Having Andy Bechtolsheim, Bill Joy, Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, and John Gage in one room, do I need to say more?
Finally I rediscovered a lot of older hardware at my recent move. It is always suprising what shows up in those moving boxes, especially since I had a lot of stuff in storage for a number of years. My wife convinced me that there is not enough room in the house for all this "junk" (afterall I was single when I bought it), so I started to move the interesting pieces into my office to start my private handheld computing exhibition :-)

The most interesting piece is certainly the Sony Magic Link PIC-2000 (in the back of the picture). It is from 1995 if I remember correctly. It is powered by General Magic's MagicCap. It is still my favorite handheld with a very intuitive UI and great features, like a build in modem, backlight and 2 PC Card slots. Back in 1995 I worked on a project with E-Plus, Cable&Wireless and General Magic connecting the Magic Link to a Cell Phone. So I could actually use it to request email and browse the web using wireless data connectivity (9600 kbps). We also developed a restaurant reservation system for Geneva, which we demoed at a global telecommunications conference in Switzerland.

Nowadays I am working without a PDA (just my laptop). I just find the current devices (e.g. Blackberry) not very compelling. However I am excited about the announced Motorola Q. Maybe that will convinve me to use a handheld again.