The Appeal of Simplicity and the Java Franchise Model

Over the last few decades, the franchise business model has proliferated, and been very successful. Around 75% of franchisee-run operations still survive, after the first 5 years of doing business. One of the reasons for this success rate is that the franchise model tries to keep the day-to-day operations of running a business, as simple as possible. This helps to quickly train unskilled workforce, and to rapidly expand the business.

Now, let's take a look at the Java franchise model. The initial appeal of Java was its relative simplicity, when compared to its first cousin, C++. In my view, this greatly reduced the barrier to entry into the field of Java programming. As Java caught on, droves of Java programmers came about. And a lot of them were not from the traditional Computer Science background.

Then Enterprise Java arrived, with its component model. Along with that, came a wave of new JSRs, frameworks, toolkits, etc; each with their own set of APIs and methodologies. Pretty soon programming in Java was not as simple as it used to be. There was so much more that now needed to be learnt. To make matters worse, with each new wave, things became increasingly more complex. One could argue that people had now begun to use Java to solve really complex problems. And those complex problems required complex solutions. Nevertheless, things had changed.

All of this makes me wonder about the future success of the Java franchise model. Now that it has lost its original appeal, the appeal of simplicity.