Stuck In The Middle of Middleware?

Have you ever felt stuck with something?

stuckThere have been products in the software industry that have been a little less than spectacular.  For instance, Motif was supposed to be the new holy grail for developing graphical user interfaces (GUIs).  (I know I am showing my age.)  But it was slow coming up to the screen.  Why?  Because the Motif designers, decided to load everything into memory at start up.  Even rarely used functions.

Now comes middle ware products.  And guess what?  The designers of those products decided to load everything into memory upon start up.  You know what happened?  Yep, they were slow at start up.  You would think developers would learn from past mistakes.

But in addition, middle ware products were bogged down because the functions stayed in memory.  That is because they were designed and tested for middle sized problems.  Yes the name for these products was “Middle Sized Ware”.  But marketeers decided the name limited the market for sales, so they dropped the “sized” part.

So why don’t software companies load functions into memory “as they are needed”?

So why aren’t software systems designed in case they are used by a thousand users?

It is because software companies are in a hurry and want to keep costs down.  So they hire cheap, inexperienced developers.

The solution is to hire a few experienced people (not all) and take some time to design a killer app like Steve Jobs did.  Nobody ever said they got stuck with an iPhone.