Many people are familiar with the Netheads vs Bellheads battle [1][2]. A Bellhead has a tightly controlled and centrally managed view of services that work all the time and on which the provider can deploy applications and consumers will pay for them, usually a heft price every month. A Nethead is happy to use loosely connected hardware that is up 99% of the time, but allows creating a massive loosely connected network of software applications, where the hardware does not care which software is running or sending traffic.
I believe, most people of my generation belong to the Netheads family, even though their employers may be Bellheads. From [1] "This philosophical divide should sound familiar. It's the difference between 19th-century scientists who believed in a clockwork universe, mechanistic and predictable, and those contemporary scientists who see everything as an ecosystem, riddled with complexity. It's the difference between central and distributed control, between mainframes and workstations."
I believe, most people of my generation belong to the Netheads family, even though their employers may be Bellheads. From [1] "This philosophical divide should sound familiar. It's the difference between 19th-century scientists who believed in a clockwork universe, mechanistic and predictable, and those contemporary scientists who see everything as an ecosystem, riddled with complexity. It's the difference between central and distributed control, between mainframes and workstations."
More recently a new generation is evolving, called Webheads. (Please do not google for this term, or you will be misled). For a Bellhead, the control must be strict and centralized, with managed services. For a Nethead, the control, if any, is distributed in the end-point, with layered applications on top of the basic best effort infrastructure. For a Webhead, everything must run or be accessible from a browser.
"Weird!" - some might say.
"How is it even in the same league?" - others might ask.
Here is my attempt to present the distinguishing attributes.
| Bellhead | Nethead | Webhead | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Evolution | Initially there were Bellheads. They were happy living in their islands, working hard towards what the island demanded, and created applications and services for the island. | Then Netheads evolved, and separated applications from the grasp of the services. And interconnected the islands. They created Internet. They created the world-wide-web. They created SIP. And the list goes on. | Then Webheads emerged, and they started moving applications to the web. Slowly and steadily. First, it was email to webmail. Then documents on web editor. Then VoIP to web telephony. Now it looks like they have spread every where and practically moved all kinds of applications to the web. |
| Control | Believe in centralized control, like one super-power to rule them all. The central element has enough gravity to pull many applications and services, resulting is heavy weight servers but thin clients. | Believe in distributed control or no-control, resulting in chaos at times. The fluidity of the services and applications keeps them decoupled, or loosely connected with each other, spreading their wings to the peripherals. | Believe in centralized control in the form of the website on which their application is hosted, but often accept the fact that there can be numerous such control elements. Work hard to avoid any connectivity or information leak to other controls, outside their own. |
| Robustness | Everything hardware must be 99.999% reliable. Overall system must be 99.9% reliable. If system goes down, even if nobody is using it right now, they will lose business. Things have strict guarantees. | The system works most of the time, but fails sometimes, but no one person or entity may be blamed, because it is collective responsibility. No guarantees, just best effort service, whatever... whatever works well | The system works if it does, and does not if it does not. They work hard to keep the system running. But many systems are poorly designed, and often fail on sudden popularity of the website. Often blame for the failure is put on the network, and many times on the database. |
| Example | To add video communication on top of voice calls is a massive renovation project involving upgrading existing services, making the pipes bigger to carry video, incorporating fixed bit rate video codecs to guarantee quality, and upgrading terminal devices to support video. It must work all the time from day one. | To add video on top of a voice call client-server application, is just changing the application to use the desktop webcam and display, and pushing new video packet along side voice, without changing any other infrastructure element in most cases. | To add video on top of a voice call web page, there is a redesign of the website to accommodate the visual elements, so that everyone viewing the same web page can see and hear each other. Regarding the codecs and bandwidth, delegate that to Flash or WebRTC. |
In some ways, like Bellheads, Webheads also think of centralized control and management. The hosting website is the controller of an application and keeper of all the user data that could be generated on that website. In a way, they both create islands of innovations which do not communicate with each other very easily, except occasionally via rowboats, i.e., the likes of oauth and web APIs. Like Netheads, Webheads do not care about lower layers of communication, as long as the browsers can reach their web servers. Many things that are well studied in the Netheads community, e.g., socket programming, voice and video communication, or binary data processing, are only recently being introduced to Webheads, e.g., in the form of WebSocket, WebRTC or ArrayBuffer. If Bellheads are purists, then Netheads are hackers. And compared to them, Webheads are hackers++.
[Heard elsewhere...]
Bellhead: "We invented video communication two decades ago - from H.320, H.323/Q.931/H.225/H.245, H.324, H.325.. (15 more). It works on ISDN, LAN, ATM, MPLS, POTS, 802.1x, ... (10 more). There is wide variety of codecs including G.711, G.722, G.723, G.729, H.261, H.263, H.264, ... (20 more). We just finalized our first $100k sale of equipment to whats-it-called company for their intra-office video telepresence."
Nethead: "We re-invented everything you did, and we can quickly build endpoint terminals that can do two party video call to large scale video broadcast. Everyone is now using what we created. We even sent our engineers to your companies to add our protocols to your equipments. Did you know that your equipment also supports SIP for video call? You may not like it, but our protocols are everywhere, and better than yours."
Webhead: "Not sure what you guys are talking about, but just got a tweet from my IT guy that our click-to-video-call app reached 1 million unique users. We are going to hire a new CEO to monetize our app now."
For Webheads, focus is not about services or protocols, but only about apps and users.
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