I’m liking Dare Obasanjo’s candor more and more. He’s already on my reading list and it’s posts like this one about enterprise architects that strike a chord with me:

The lesson here is that all this complexity being pushed by so-called enterprise architects, software vendors and big 5 consulting companies is bullshit. If you are building distributed applications for your business, you really need to ask yourself what is so complex about the problems that you have to solve that makes it require more complex solutions than those that are working on a global scale on the World Wide Web today.

What makes this post even more interesting to me is that Dare works for Microsoft in the MSN Spaces division and one of Microsoft’s primary feeding grounds is the whole enterprise sector. It’s one where they claim to outperform Linux with Apache on large scale projects. I realize Dare wasn’t making any anti-Microsoft sentiments with his post, but Microsoft is using this same complexity game that big companies just have to go with souped up expensive licensing software to get the job done when meanwhile open source software can and is being deployed on some very large websites across the world.

I see this with programming jobs. Some programmers want to make out programming like it is some huge black art that nobody but them can handle. Please, I’m a programmer and I seek out to dispel the ego that too many of my brethern possess. Programming can be complex but not for most web stuff. AJAX? It’s well within the skills of every day people to learn to work with AJAX from scratch. Hardcore game programming, like the guys building sophistocated AI for games like Halo, now that’s complex programming. Low, low, low level search engine algorithms are also not easy. Also anybody who spends a lot of time in assembler. Now those programmers can talk about complexity, but web programming and most desktop programming? Anybody reading this that puts their mind to it can learn this type of programming.

And no, Jeremy, I’m not bashing on web developers by admitting that there are varying levels of skill. It is no less distinguished to be writing Yahoo widgets than it is to be working on device drivers but the level of knowledge and skill for both vary considerably. The lower you go to the metal, the more complicated it becomes. Yes, web developers have to deal with browsers and conflicting formats and upgrades and hackers and blah, blah, blah, but they are working in english instead of hex.

Now back to the enterprise.

I remember talking at Northern Voice with Markus Frind, founder of Plentyoffish.com. Frind claims he’s making more than $10,000 per day from Google and doing millions of unique visitors a day. Scoble wrote about the same conversation here. Frind and I went to lunch together and I was able to learn more about his business philosophy and what technologies he was using to power his site. All Microsoft, BTW. He was absolutely ecstatic about the performance he’d been able to squeeze out of SQL Servers. The ironic thing is prior to lunch he was asking Scoble how to get in touch with engineers at Microsoft to deal with scaling concerns. Had he met a brick wall?

I’ve mentioned here before that I’ve worked with some very large websites and most of them are using Linux / Apache / MySQL, not Microsoft / SQL Server. The dig against Apache/Unix seems to be it’s more expensive hiring sysadmins. Let me see, would I rather pay for skilled employees or pay Microsoft? I think I’ll take the former.

I also remember when Visual Studio was launched lamenting how it was not aimed at the small developer shops like ours. It was targeted toward — you got it — enterprise. Teams and teams of programmers all running around trying to manage large products.

Maybe it’s time for more emphasis to be put back on the small shops, the smaller developers, the ones who are often truly creative instead of throwing so much money and effort trying to sex up the startrip enterprise.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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