It pains me, truly, to see a cloud platform being praised for its resemblance to what developers already know. If I could say, "already know and love," that would be another thing — but what about platforms that developers merely know and tolerate? My next live webinar will look at ways to move to a higher level.
Really, doesn't it seem like Stockholm Syndrome when people seem to be doing their best to preserve their familiar pain while moving to a cloud environment? Imagine a man from Mars, newly arrived on this planet — and finding the place equipped with a global standards-based network that's dripping with high-leverage services and APIs. Would he complain that it didn't give him the freedom to do all the hard stuff in his own, Martian way? That's the perversity I see in too many critiques of the most advanced cloud platform options.
Sure, you would never make a dumb security mistake in your application that compromises the entire enterprise environment. You would never settle for testing the app until it appears to handle all cases, only to find that it breaks with the next upgrade cycle — because you didn't design to the specification, instead of merely testing on the current implementation.
But even if you're only an average developer, doesn't that mean that roughly half the other developers out there are sloppier, dumber, and generally lower-G than you? Do you want your money, your health, your access to government services, and your on-line entertainment in the hands of the bottom half of that bell curve?
Or would you like to see more and more of the tricky but generic tasks of development — data protection, true global query optimization, rigorous security with granular privilege assignment based on actual business process requirements — being built into the platform, so every developer can focus a higher fraction of finite attention on the differentiating parts of the project? And produce better work in less time, as well as getting the benefits of faster and broader deployment, instead of merely deploying the same kind of apps at lower cost?
I'll talk with a Force.com partner who's delivered these benefits, to many different companies and non-profits, in a live webinar on Jan.28 from 10-11 a.m. Pacific Time. Join us for that conversation – and find me, now, also Tweeting on (not just) cloud developments and practices.