Re: "Enterprise ready"
Yes, its a problem.
With Chrome such a popular browser, it might be that this really forces peoples hand.
BUT, some people just don't have the option - they can't just magic away the need to run Java no matter what changes are made by Chromium.
As someone who manages many systems for many different organisations using many different web applications from many different providers - with varying levels of importance to their businesses, I can assure everyone that the world simply does function the way these developers are deluding themselves to believe that it does.
With the move to web applications on the rise, the Chromium team are finding themselves where Microsoft have been for a long time - having to deal with security issues caused by third-party software. Of course, MS has its share of issues with the OS itself but third-party software like Flash and Java has been a constant bugbear for them.
The fanciful idea that once you move your applications into a browser you don't have to worry about compatibility or the local environment or anything is starting to crack. Well, not starting, but the cracks are more visible.
It might sound like sour grapes from someone who sees his 'traditional' IT experience muscled out by the world of 'cloud' and 'startup' but it's not - I am far busier now helping people make these new applications work in their environments than I have been support 'normal' software.
This promise of stuff 'just working' is, to any IT person, a fantasy and any vendor who claims otherwise is not to be believed. Of course, people still end up signing up and migrating to web-based applications based on these promises and only later do they find they have to call in IT support to pickup up the pieces and try to bridge the gap between what they have and what they expected based on inadequate testing and the enthusiastic sales pitches from 'evangelists'.
I've seen it time and again and several times I have been called in where a department has signed a contract for a cloud-based service and only a afterwards realised that their (e.g.) end-of-months reports won't work properly or some feature that they need and were sold on requires a whole bunch of additional plugins that aren't compatible.
With this specific issue, I am seeing reprecussions right now with a cloud software provider (who tells users that they must use Chrome) who supply a plugin to perform some relatively important function that the client uses 'all the time'. Guess which type of plugin it is . . .
When questioned, they don't have plans to update the plugin. Why not? Oh well, that's because they have an 'app' that does this and much more besides and is much simpler to boot. The catch? Nothing much - it's needs Office 365. When questioned, their response was that they couldn't understand why the client wasn't using Office 365. I could only agree with them: they didn't understand.
(For the record, their - overseas - parent company manages all e-mail and licensing and has quite strict policies on this kind of thing.)
Such is the way of these things - the promise is that the move to 'cloud' and 'web' somehow magically resolves all the issues and concerns that occur with that old, out-dated software. The truth is that all the concerns still exist, they are just shifted and often to a location you have no control over.
Again, I get plenty of work from all this - it's just frustrating seeing the same thing happen again and again and vendors still keep selling the lie that the solution to every problem is more cloud. More frustrating is that people keep buying it.
(The disclaimer is that I have no problem with 'cloud' and 'web' based software - at least not as a rule. The problem is that using such software doesn't mean that you can just ignore the considerations that normally go with choosing and running software.)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
