Some recent articles comparing transactional apps in the financial services marketplace to ecommerce applications are both misguided, and to my mind critically annoying to those of us who have to deal with business people who read them.
Misguided myth: Amazon does more transactions per day then the entire financial services marketplace, so why is this so hard in financial services?
Depends on how you measure it, but assuming its true, does the latency per transaction matter? If amazon drops your bid, does it matter? You just hit "bid" again...is it okay for Amazon to miss a message? What if they tell you you were successful late?...basically...guaranteed receipt of messages at very high volumes in near real time, with absolute limits on latency aren't easy requirements.
eCommerce applications on the web are not held to the same metrics, nor are their transactions subjected to the scrutiny that a typical financial services application is held to.
You think this would be obvious..but you'd be amazed how many people (including people in the industry) actually buy into doing this comparison and then pontificate on how developers doing work in the web ecommerce space must somehow have more on the ball. Maybe its because they write in (fill in the blank scripting language) instead of C++...
Or maybe its because the software industry pundit circuit lacks for good material.
Articles like this do nothing but create misery for engineers who have to deal with business managers who read them.
No comments:
Post a Comment