C4 Day Two: Aaron Hillegass on the enterprise and solving real problems

Hillegass was a last-minute addition to the C4 lineup but a decidedly worthwhile one. Standing tall in a dapper cowboy hat, Hillegass demonstrated his confidence as a speaker with a relaxed stage demeanor. Every ounce of charisma was necessary, as our speaker had chosen a hard topic to sell to a crowd largely composed of independent developers: why you should pursue the enterprise.

A brief history of the stagnation of computing opened up the talk, and heads were nodding as Hillegass relayed his dismay that the paradigms of modern computing and software development have changed so little since 1983. In that time, our speaker argued that “snacky” culture has become dominant. A colorful excerpt on this point:

“Before MySpace we had this thing called ‘friendships.’ Before NBA Live we had ‘basketball.’ Before Second Life we had ‘life.’ Before Delicious Library we had ‘shelves.’ Wil [Shipley], Delicious Library was a waste of your talents.”

Whoa there. Now he had the room’s full attention.

The meat of Hillegass’ talk was this: make a ten year commitment to solve a problem; your example business plan is to find a way to eliminate wasteful resources. He argued that a majority of the markets for Mac software are already dominated by Apple, big software houses like Adobe, and many of the independent developers in attendance at C4. The untapped market for Mac software is in the enterprise, and the cash is as green as the grass on the other side.

Hillegass outlined a realistic stack for the next generation of Mac-driven enterprise apps. Interestingly, this stack starts with a Linux server. On top of this sits a database (preferably Postgres) and a web application platform (preferably Django); leave email and calendaring to Zimbra or the like. Throw in interfaces via a Mac desktop client and the web browser and maybe even a J2ME app for mobile platforms and Hillegass thinks you’ve got the enterprise covered.

But this is a Mac conference. So what did our speaker have to say about the Mac end of conquering the enterprise? “Apple is not your friend,” for starters. Essentially, Hillegass argued that Apple had a strong set of enterprise technologies from their NeXT legacy (the EOF) that they abandoned over the last decade, leaving enterprise-minded developers in the lurch. Hillegass advocated a concerted effort by the Mac developer community to replace and modernize these technologies, starting with a database abstraction framework dubbed the Generic Database Access Protocol (GDAP) presently in development by one Andy Satori. On top of this would sit a suite of Object-Relational Mapping libraries.

Interestingly, much of the Q&A was non-technical. The audience was eager to pick Hillegass’ brain on the more social aspects of Mac enterprise development: how to discover markets/problem domains (make non-programmer friends, talk to VCs about their pet ideas), advice for students (again, get out from behind the keyboard), outsourcing support (do it), business (“choosing a business partner is like choosing a wife”), and the future of Apple’s chosen technologies (“I wouldn’t be miserable using Objective-C for another ten years”).

All in all Hillegass gave a varied and interesting talk, a good combination of business savvy and technologist criticism. Though some feathers were ruffled at the outset of his talk, I think the room had come around to many of his suggestions by the session’s end.