| To be honest, the repositioning isn't really a response to the brain drain -- it's a reflection of a changing culture at Basho that was the cause of the brain drain in the first place. The primary reason I left Basho is that I felt the company was turning into a "don't invent here" culture, the polar opposite of "not invented here". The goal was no longer to solve hard distributed systems problems and build amazing technology, but to just integrate various "trendy" technologies and make an enterprise simplification play. The problem is that most of these other technologies have major failings and/or punt on the corner cases that us old time Basho engineers obsessed over. The whole point of Riak was to be the most highly available, fault tolerant, trusted database you could use. You can't just integrate Riak with arbitrary products X, Y, and Z without compromising on those core tenants. I really hope Basho can deliver on the promises they're making about this data platform product. I really do. But, for various reasons I can't really talk about, I'd say I'm extremely skeptical. (BTW, for those that don't know me: I'm a former Principal Engineer at Basho and was the lead developer on a variety of sub-systems in Riak over the last four years) |