By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily
There’s an essay that’s going around some of the top news sites, called “If Wishes were iPhones, then beggars would call,” about the idea of 3rd party tools on the iPhone.
The main point of the article is this:
Apple has been unwaveringly clear that the iPhone is theirs. Not yours, not Ambrosia’s, not J. Random Hacker’s. You may own the hardware, but you only have a limited license to use the software, and an ongoing contract to use the network. If you don’t like those terms, your only recourse is to shop somewhere else to begin with….
I don’t understand this continuing obsession with buying things that you need to break before they do what you want.
I don’t know what it is either; I just know that it exists. It is the urge in all mad scientists to go grave robbing for old, discarded technology that can be put to new use, to twist and mangle things into doing what they were never designed – or ought never – to do, to cackle with glee as we defy the laws of man, God, and nature to raise our voice up to the heavens, and scream against the thunder, “LIFE! GIVE MY CREATION LIFE!“
My first computer was built in 1996 – back in the days when IRQ conflicts were a serious problem and required setting jumpers to modify – by a family friend from old discarded PC parts that would have otherwise ended up on a rubbish heap. We dubbed it “Frankenstein.”
The end result of all this stuff is an entire geek subculture, only starting to show through – of hardware hackers. In two weeks, for example, the Maker Faire is coming to our home town of Austin where people make stuff by breaking stuff – there’s an entire sub-exhibit on taking old children’s toys and making them into strange instruments – called Circuit Bending. There’s a few displays which show off the capabilities of the Arduino, an electronics prototyping board which can be configured for a variety of purposes. And on the networking side; demonstrations of how to build your own Beowulf clusters.
But that’s the geek mentality. Create. Invent. Remix.
Apple’s whole business model is stifling those tendencies in exchange for providing a simpler product – and that’s not a bad thing for Apple, because they get to sell to the 90% of the human population that aren’t geeks and don’t want to bother with figuring out new and exciting ways to do things. They even stopped carrying a mid-range tower line of computers. But if you notice, Apple sticks well to the consumer side of the market, not the enterprise side – sure, they have the Xserve, but they really haven’t followed up with other entries into the enterprise market since its introduction.
In enterprises we’ve seen a trend over this past decade from big, proprietary system management frameworks to individual tools that work together, and I think that can be attributed to the Frankenstien Syndrome. Even Cisco is breaking up their IOS into different modules. We here at NetQoS sell all our products individually, even though they all work together through the NetQoS Performance Center Web portal. We even made it a clear goal to allow third-party Web applications – any third party Web application – to work with the NetQoS Performance Center. Figure out a way to map network slowdowns to Google Maps? Go ahead, we won’t stop you.
Because it’s important to harness – not stifle – those geek tendencies which make geeks so well suited for enterprise networking.
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