Hydrazine Needs a Disclaimer

Contrary to some other punditry I read earlier today, Hydrazine is not a direct competitor to Live Mesh. The Microsoft and Sun cloud computing strategies have dissimilar goals, and Hydrazine is more expansive.

My eWEEK colleague Darryl Taft has the goods on Hydrazine and companion Project Insight. Sun's strategy is simply brilliant and seeks to do for software developers and designers what the Web 2.0 platform has done for Web content and commerce. Hydrazine won't come easy, pitting Sun against Adobe and Microsoft in a race to provide the best cloud development platform.

Each of the companies will offer tools for improving designer-developer workflows. Adobe's toolset is stronger on the designer end and Microsoft better covers the developer. Hydrazine is more incomplete (Sun doesn't really have designer tools) but more expansive. Sun wants to create a "hosted" cloud computing platform for designers and developers. The concept is bold and very Web 2.0. But Sun will have to go up against Adobe and Microsoft to get there.

Microsoft should have come up with this idea (maybe the company has but just not announced it), because the disparate pieces are there in its designer-developer-services platform toolset to build something similar and a whole lot faster. There's a real blueprint here, if the company is willing to take some of that fat-client functionality skyward.

Microsoft also has to consider the competitive risks Hydrazine could create, particularly if it leads to a Sun alliance with either Adobe or Google—or both. Sun will leverage technologies that resoundingly compete with Microsoft developer tools or standards. Darryl rightly points out Sun's JavaFX as an extensible alternative to Microsoft's XAML. Adobe and Sun are more aligned with Java EE than .NET, although they surely would harshly rub noses around Flex. But, otherwise, the two companies are more aligned in development approach than either is with Microsoft.

Strangely, I see conceptual similarities between infant Java and Project Hydrazine. In the 1990s, then-Sun CEO Scott McNealy pitched Java as "write once, run anywhere." Project Hydrazine is a massive magnification of the concept, but in some ways mirror imaged: Run anywhere, write once. Sun seeks to create a massive cloud development platform from which applications/services can run anytime, anywhere and on any device.

Bob Brewin, Sun's chief technology officer for software, told Darryl that the Hydrazine cloud would have "an extensible container that allows you to run apps—like Amazon EC2 or Google App Engine." Doesn't the "container" concept sound familiar, just on the server cloud instead of a desktop application? Run anywhere, write once.

Sun's embrace of scalable services like EC2 is more Web 2.5—or dare I say 3.0—than Web 2.0. How many developers work in the cloud where they deploy? Hydrazine could provide the platform.

Something else very Web 2.0: Companion Project Insight is an analytics tool for seeing who's using the developer's products/services and creating the means to "inject advertising, monetize or somehow leverage it," Bob told Darryl. My question: Why build a new analytics tool when there are so many good ones already available? This is just one area where a Google-Sun partnership makes sense.

Where Live Mesh and Project Hydrazine share some commonality is hardware. Microsoft's software plus services strategy is misguided, or perhaps misstated. Live Mesh is broader: Software plus hardware plus services. The original Java concept was essentially the same, as is Project Hydrazine—software plus hardware plus services. But Sun isn't yet talking about synchronization of data across devices or services. Universal sync is a top design priority for Live Mesh.

Sun's project name is revealing. Hydrazine is a hydronitrogen compound used in several industrial processes, including the manufacture of foam rubber, pesticides or pharmaceuticals. The toxic substance was once used for rocket fuel. Pick a connotation: Blowing agent for pushing aside other cloud computing concepts or rocket fuel for reaching the computing cloud.

That said, Hydrazine is a God-awful code name, for the pronunciation. Java is light and breathy, while hydrazine is a multi-headed "zeen" that sounds dangerously chemical or pharmaceutical. I immediately think of some old-fashion drug name. Modern prescription drug TV commercials all come with disclaimers about side effects. Maybe Hydrazine should have its own disclaimer, seeing as how it revives some aging Java concepts and butts up against more advanced Adobe and Microsoft designer-developer strategies.

Warning: Hydrazine may not Mesh with some people. Some Hydrazine users report seeing a Flash or Silverlight after prolonged use. Some longtime Java consumers may experience delusions of grandeur and may get on a Soapbox or dramatically change their Expression. The following professions should seek medical consultation before using Hydrazine: Acrobat, Live Messenger, Illustrator or those people working in a Visual Studio.