“My God. It's full of databases.”
Dave Bowman's voice hung in the air, after the audio player shut off.
“Where's it now?” the Presidential Advisor asked.
“Huh,” the Presidential Advisor muttered. “So, this is all we got. Ok, ok. Dan, give us all a recap on the whole thing. From the beginning to this.” The Presidential Advisor raised his right forefinger, making tiny circles with the tip, indicating the Dave Bowman's final words.
Dr. Dan Howard sat forward in his chair and began to speak, monotonically:
“During development, I functioned as the lead engineer, recruiter, the top manager, blogger, advance promoter, everything. On Tuesday, January 30, 2007, the mission launched. Specifically, the mission was to deliver a piece of software for getting software developers to use databases without caring much about either SQL, a.k.a. ‘Structured Query Language’, or caring much about the database themselves. I was attempting pretty high tech stuff: doing database work without installing a database, showing and manipulating the database in a very graphical form, SQL editing with fully context sensitive auto-completion hints, a deep help system. Out of those attempts came the company, named SQLAware Corporation. The software itself was christened SQLAware Professional 1.0 Preview (Build 124). Slides, please.”
The projector whirred to life. Everybody swivelled their chairs towards the end of the room, to view the projector's output.
“Initial telemetry reports http://www.sqlaware.com/ as the URL for the company and the software. In anticipation of the launch of the SQLAware Corporation, I've had a simpler forward market vehicle, codenamed Dan on Everything Else, deployed since 2004 at http://www.danoneverythingelse.com/.”
A man from the Presidential Scientific Council cleared his voice. “This all seems pretty standard but how do you prevent blowback? The Dan on Everything Else blog isn't commercial. Mixing advertisements into a business blog isn't stable. Your audience will melt away.”
“I've thought of that. I plan to put small ads for the company and the software at either above or below the articles. I will keep the content strictly separated: no sidelong or indirect references to my own company or its software in the content. But, more importantly, I hope to leverage SQLAware Corporation's existence as an assurance to everybody that the blog content will be better: more based on experience, more concrete, more specific, more relevant. I'm looking at new, more practical, articles on legal, product development and web site development. I hope to spin it as a positive, not a negative.”
One of the Pentagon people spoke up: “Why care? Databases are old news. The Web situation is more important. That's where the action is.”
Dr. Howard frowned, obviously annoyed. “True, databases and database query tools have been around forever, since the 1970's. It's established, a known quantity. The database vendors themselves, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and MySQL, all have their own query software, though it is generally undistinguished and only operates with their own database. A large company, named Quest Software, has built a billion dollar market cap in the space at a $6,000 per user price point. It's an existing market with a multitude of competitors with similar products ... in a stable state.”
“The market is a monolith, uniform, impenetrable. But there is a second possible interpretation of the data.”
“The HAL-9000 re-analyzed the data. HAL-9000 reduced it to four fundamental questions. Do people use databases? Yes. Are databases easy to use? No. Does the market exist? Yes. Does a single company already monopolize the market? No. Even intuition and common sense supports these results. HAL-9000 concluded that a second possible stable state existed for this market. SQLAware Professional 1.0 Preview (Build 124) is our initial technology to find that second state. A state with a single company that dominates the market.”
The Presidential Advisor said: “Let me get this straight. Everybody is spending a trillion dollars a year building stuff on the Web. Everybody says the desktop is dead. But HAL-9000 says that there's a big market for a SQL development app with lots of money to be made by whoever does it first. Is that about it?”
“Yes.”
“If I convince the President to buy this thing, what's he buying?”
Dr. Howard turned to the projector, calling out slides as he projected them.
“A database inspector, builder and filler, codenamed Cyclops. Competitors use a tree control; we show the database tables as columns and rows, directly editable. Easier to see the database, easier to put data in the database.”
“A SQL editor, codenamed Intuition. Competitors use a list of keywords; we do full parsing to show popup lists of commands, punctuation, table names, column names, whatever. Easier to type the right command, figure out what the right command looks like.
“A deep context help system, codenamed Athena. Competitors show all help topics for the selected command; we show a help topic based on both the command and its context within the statement. Easier to understand because we show shorter but more specific help for the particular object.”
“Future Version 1.0 and Version 2.0 features for free. Access to betas. Serious consideration given to suggestions. Future innovations and integrations.”
“Cost?”
“$399 for a single user license with free upgrades to all 1.x and 2.x versions and with an special upgrade price for the 3.x version. These versions will be available in subsequent years. If you work as a software developer for a corporation, $399 should be easily affordable on either yours or your manager's corporate credit card.”
“In fifteen minutes, I've got to walk into a meeting with the President. I've got convince him that you can do this thing. How you going to do it?”
“Hire like crazy. Sell like crazy. Win like crazy. Give big pieces of equity to people who can get things done. Yes, and the basic technology is already built.”
The Presidential Advisor nodded absently at Dr. Howard. “‘My God. It's full of databases.’ HAL-9000 know what that means?”
“Not yet. That's what we hope to find out.”
My God. It's full of databases.
If you liked this article, you might also like the “2010: The Year We Make Contact” film, available from Netflix for instant viewing for free with your paid Netflix membership plan.
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