online community and e-commerce site. We had all these modules do different
things. We had two versions: one was in Java Server Pages, very straightforward,
JSP talking to the Oracle data model, and the other one was an AOLserver Tcl,
which is kind of an obscure web server used by America Online for most of
their web services—very efficient. That was what we had started with in 1995.
It was state of the art in ’95; today you could do just as well with Microsoft
Internet Information Server and Active Server Pages. Anyway, it was the first
web server to have database connection pooling. We’d become a little bit identified
with it, and the VCs and their pet managers were convinced that, if we
just became the Java company, we’d have an increase in sales. Customers didn’t
seem to care.
Going back to 1998, we had plans for three versions: Java Server Pages,
AOLserver, and Microsoft Active Server Pages in Visual Basic, but it turned out
there was no customer demand for the Microsoft one. People said, “Look, I
paid my monthly fee. I want my site up and running.” We had a lot of cost efficiencies
from running the AOLserver version internally for our hosted customers,
and if the team was on vacation and there was a problem with the
customer’s site, any other programmer could go and maintain it because all the
files were in the same places; everything was named conventionally. It was very
easy for programmer A to debug programmer B’s work.
So what was the problem? We were making money, customers were happy,
people were using this. Well, with any big system, people write down a list of
things that they don’t like, that they could do better. It gets to be a long list. The
biggest problem with our system was the same problem with SAP: you have
data models, some customizations, and some scripts to talk to the data models.
When you upgrade from one version to the next, you have all this SQL stuff
that has to be done in Oracle to migrate the old data model to the new one—if
you add columns to the tables, for example. If you are setting up a brand new
system, it’s easy. You just create tables. But in an existing running system, you
have to alter the tables. That’s kind of a pain.
If there have been customizations done to it that haven’t been rolled back
into the toolkit, you may have to recustomize a bit. This is a problem for SAP,
and it was a problem for us. My attitude as an engineer was that SAP is a company
with billions of dollars in assets and lots of smart people. They had never

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