Personally, this year surely was a wild ride. Being blessed with a child – without wanting to sound corny – absolutely turned our lifes upside down. I’ ve had and still have the benefit of being able to choose my working hours and I try to see as much of our son Jakob as possible. For the last month of 2010 and the first one of 2011 I took a mini parental leave, doing virtually nothing work-related at the time, thoroughly enjoying all of the baby business. When I got back to work, I quickly fell back into my usual routine of traveling around and providing mostly Magento-related training throughout the country. What I particularly like about this is getting around, meeting new people and being faced with new situations. Mostly, I got to know agencies using shop software for their clients and the trying to make it fit their purposes. I also worked for a fashion producer who wanted to make his in-house IT team fully understand and make the best use of the software.

In all these encounters I realised that more than anything else, I’d wanted to get to the more abstract level of things. There are surely people who enjoy talking endlessly about the nitty gritty of this or that piece of software. Even if this was the prime reason people invited and paid for me delivering the training, to me it was always important to shed some light on the bigger picture: If this or that feature is so terribly hard to implement, maybe it does not make so much sense in the first place. Is it worthwhile keeping developers busy for weeks on end just to show something to the customer that he does not really need or know how to use?

About half a year ago, in a post called Magento dude identity in good condition – anyone interested? I’d already shared my wish not to work with and for only one software package for the rest of my professional life, but rather acknowledge as well as talk about and use alternatives. Fortunately, in the spring of 2011, I had the chance to get to know both the guys from OXID and from Shopware pretty well. While the meeting of the former was the beginning of a cooperation that led to me writing the first book about OXID eShop (which is due at the end of this month) and providing official OXID trainings, the latter is a relationship that still needs to be explored further in 2012. In both cases, I got to know the software stacks pretty well – both from a technical and non-technical point of view – but I still like to keep an open mind about the question when and how this or that software package should be used ideally rather than engaging in trench warfare.

In summer I had my final go at being a full-time coder, which showed me and others that, well, I don’t want to and cannot be a full-time coder :-) As much as I like getting to know new technologies and diving deep into code in order to understand it and be able to provide the developer trainings, coding for money is just not my thing. Another lesson learned in 2011.

The year ended  - as some of you have seen – with me becoming a punk, member of the ecomPunk team and, without the slightest exaggeration, contributor to the world’s best commerce blog. Together with a great team I will keep adding good stuff and use it as my primary journalistic outlet for all things ecommerce-y in my life.

And boy there is much to talk about! That became very clear that December night in Frankfurt, which provided the icing on my 2011 commerce cake: I caught up with some of the brightest minds in commerce I know – you know who you are – and discussed what moved and shook our industry and what we will see in the future.

Good to see you 2012 – please stay and enjoy the show.

Magento-busy since 2008

Since writing the first drafts of the Magento user manual (published by O’Reilly in early 2009) in late 2008, my business life has been dominated by this piece of software. Starting from a couple of webshops I built on the basis of Magento, I spent a good part of last year travelling through the country and educating clients on how to use Magento and how to develop individual extensions. In the beginning of 2010, I had the chance of working in a major multinational Magento project and got to know how clocks tick in those setups. My responsibilty was for the project to benefit from my knowledge of Magento, both from the end-user and the programmatic point of view. Being a fairly sufficient developer myself, I could talk directly to the developers and even add a bit of code here and there. In other words: I got to know Magento pretty well, especially in those busy quarters 1 and 2 of 2010. In between, I wrote a couple of articles for online and print t3n and the O’Reilly blog, started the Magento podcast with my buddy Rico Neitzel, spoke at the Meet Magento conferences and helped making the Magento developer handbook (published by O’Reilly in 2010) see the day of light.

I don’t intend to brag here – although I have to admit that seeing my own writing in the shape and form of a book still makes me proud – but simply wanted to outline what has happend during the last years and how I gained the Magento expert status somewhere on the way. This status was a door-opener, enabled me to meet many interesting people and look behind the scenes of ambitious eCommerce projects. And, not to forget, the Magento fame allowed me to charge very decent daily rates and, besides other things, enabled me to be picky about the projects and customers I wanted to work with and find the time to read and blog about interesting developments in eCommerce. Thanks a lot!

Mid-2010: Turning point

So, you might ask, what’s your problem? Well, from the business point-of-view, there is none: Almost daily I get Magento-related questions and project queries and I could just carry on and live a very happy life in ecommerce. However, about halfway through 2010 I started questioning the Magento approach, both from a technical as well from a business point of view. I realised that many clients I got to know struggled not despite but because of the software and the company behind it. Important questions, regarding software security issues for example, remained unanswered, and the wish for more transparency and community support is still acute. In this respect, news of the recent eBay-Magento deal was the cherry on the cake. If today someone tells me that he or she is doing or planning something Magento-related I cannot help but think a regretful ‘really?’.

So what now

There is more to eCommerce than eCommerce software. And there is more to eCommerce software than Magento. I got to know other software such as Shopware and OXID eShop pretty well during the last couple of months and I will continue to investigate interesting developments in the ecommerce space. My aim is to be able to provide objective answers if someone asks me for my opinion on their ecommerce strategy. If a little Magento/eBay/xCommerce comes along the way, I don’t mind at all – but I’m not wearing my Magento dude uniform for work anymore.

This deal – or, too be more precise, its announcement – is perfectly timed. For one, having finally reached important milestones such as education, the Magento Go SaaS initiative as well as a European presence, Magento is a most attractive marriage partner. Secondly, with the Magento Developer’s Paradise in full gear – which arguably is the most important developer event of the Magento year- Magento sends out an important message: Magento carries on. In the shape and form of Magento 2, a complete refactoring of the current Magento platform, the core developers address the most urgent problems of developers around the world.

Undoubtedly, Magento’s community is a very important and valuable asset, and it would be very foolish for eBay to throw it away. Likewise, Roy Rubin and Yoav Kutner are an integral part of the Magento family, and it would be equally foolish of eBay to introduce the world to a new Magento dynamic duo.

Yet, today’s announcement marks the end of an era – eBay is now in full control of how Magento will carry on. eBay has recently invested in a couple of companies, aiming at supporting their core business with a new eCommerce initiative. Most notably, eBay is now in possession of GSI Commerce, which is yet another eCommerce platform and has shares in Intershop, a large German eCommerce platform. In other words: eBay now has various eCommerce-related technological advancements at its disposal, and it remains to be seen how they form a coherent strategy out of these puzzle-pieces.

As harsh as it sounds: Magento will be one of these puzzle-pieces. We hear about something called X.Commerce, an open platform that eBay would like to endorse and develop and use Magento as its core technology. What this platform will look like also remains to be seen

The second book clearly addresses developers who want to make functional changes and really dive into the system. It’s a 270-pager written by Nurul Ferdous in the style of a cookbook: This means that rather than explaining things step by step and laying a theoretical foundation, the Development Cookbook is a collection of so-called recipes that provide pragmatic solutions to common problems. Rather than reading it cover-to-cover, people will mostly jump to specific recipes to find the cures for their illnesses. For this reason, in my opinion it is best used in combination with some sort of documentation that provides some more background.
The recipes in this book cover a lot of ground and require different skill levels. For example, there are administrative topics such as setting up a configurable product – which does not require any programming skills at all – as well as advanced recipes such as creating customised modules and widgets and making sure the right source models are used. Moreover, the recipes do not only deal with topics that are exclusive to Magento but also include setting up MySQL database replication and benchmarking the application’s overall performance. All of these topics are losely connected and organised along chapters such as Performance Optimization and Creating a Module.
In summary it can be said that the topics cover some of the most often discussed problems and requirements that occur during Magento development. As such, the author provides a valuable source for developers seeking easy-to-implement solutions.

For the Imagine eCommerce conference which took place February 7-9th, Magento Inc. invited 650 community members from around the globe to present new products and services as well as to discuss the various technical and non-technical aspects of doing eCommerce with Magento. From what I could gather from the web (I couldn’t be there in person), the highlights were:

New software versions. As could be expected, Magento released new stable versions of their three software editions, including CE 1.5.0, PE 1.10.0.0 and EE 1.10.0.0. Unfortunately, a severe vulnerability was found in CE 1.5.0.0 shortly after its release, which has now been fixed in the CE 1.5.0.1.

Software-as-a-Service. Some time ago, Magento has started developing an on-demand service for their software, hitherto named Project Stratus. Under the new name Magento Go, the company enters the realm of on-demand software where Demandware and others have positioned themselves. In addition, in what Magento refers to as platform-as-a-service (PaaS), they enable developers to build applications around the on-demand solution the same way they did for the self-deployed versions of Magento via MagentoConnect.

(For a more detailed review, please refer to the – German – Openstream blog.)

As if this wasn’t enough already, at yesterday’s eBay Analyst day, Mark Carges, Senior Vice President Global Products and Chief Technology Officer, eBay Marketplace has revealed that eBay has acquired a 49% share in Magento last year. Of course there were rumours in the Magento community that this was indeed the case (one just has to go to the Magento admin panel to see how prominent the PayPal payment method has been made), but now it has been officially confirmed by both eBay/PayPal and Magento.

Clearly, the fact that eBay revealed its investment shorty after Magento’s announcement of its Magento go is not a coincidence. Rather, in my opinion it points to the path both eBay and Magento will follow in the next couple of years. I could imagine that eBay would like to be able to offer its sellers an alternative to its infrastructure by offering an on-demand service that gives them the flexibility to continue their growth. Currently, if say a powerseller feels that he’s too restricted by the eBay platform, he will opt for setting up his own webstore or use another on-demand-service – both ways, eBay is losing a client. For Magento, this strategy would also mean to shift its focus away from being at the forefront of eCommerce innovation to catering for the mainstream, as Jochen Krisch has suggested.

From personal experience I can say that although the Enterprise world seems lucrative at first sight – given the amount of money that’s being spent for licences, implementation and support – those projects are often very high maintenance, not just on a technical but more on an organisational level. Despite its amazing growth, with about 250 employees Magento Inc. is still a relatively small eCommerce company compared to other giants like IBM for instance – no wonder the management concentrates on more standardised (and less maintenance) products for smaller and medium customers.

New skills?

Having a non-technical background (I’m a literature guy after all), I still see myself as a fairly decent PHP and especially Magento developer, confidently coding away in the world of the web. However, trying to get my head around a real programming language was just too much. Going into the nitty-gritty of memory management. The steps you need to do in order to get things done. Dealing with such a language seems to require a major mindset shift, away from a networked environment to a device-centered one. I’m kind of stating the obvious here, but it took a couple of chapters before it got really tangible for me.

The road to salvation

In order to strive for the greater good, mankind has overcome far more serious hurdles than mastering Objective-C. (Just imagine how many heads had to be chopped off in order for us to enjoy the republic.) In my case, all the time I forced myself to learn this language, I couldn’t stop wondering whether this was really worthwhile.
Undoubtedly, the Apple machinery keeps churning out innovations in the mobile space like no other company has done before. According to the last earnings’ call, Apple has sold more than 7 million iPads and north of 16 million iPhones in the last quarter, and I’m convinced that Apple will continue to thrive even without Steve Jobs at the helm. The App store is growing, and with its new desktop version there is an even bigger playground for iOS developers. Apple has perfected the purchase process for digital goods so that apps can be paid for and app developers can make a living – to say the least. Yet: this is not the future.

Reaching people

And now for the signs: In the last weeks I have seen various people showing their Android-powered HTC smartphones to me. Let’s be honest: the screens aren’t quite as brilliant as the iPhone 4 retina display and touch is not quite as responsive. So, on a hardware level, there’s a little bit of catching up to do. But the times of the G1 are definitely over for sure.

However, this is not the critical point: More importantly, those were people that were not part of the tech community at all. Those were members of the family that just went to a local electronic retailer and got themselves affordable smartphones because everybody, well, talks about smartphones. They might have gotten an iPhone if it wasn’t for the steep price tag. But because an iPhone is significantly more expensive, they opted for the Android phones. Talking about price: I’m sure they won’t ever pay for an app. Seriously, how many normal people have a Google account connected to a creditcard to be able to use Google Checkout?

To make myself clear: I don’t want to start yet another “what’s the best mobile OS” discussion. Rather, what I’m trying to get at is that in the long run – or future if you will – it’s all about reach. Apple will continuously grow its fanbase, because consumers like their approach to design as well as the curated software experience the whole Apple ecosystem provides. But Apple will never be a mainstream experience – and I seriously doubt that this is what they are going for anyway.

So what’s the future?

No surprise here, the future lies within the (mobile) browser and is coded in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I have seen what jQuery mobile and similar JavaScript frameworks can do, I’ve tested how easy it is to run a Phonegap based app on both a Samsung Galaxy tab as well as on my iPad. I expect that the cross-platform movement will continue to make significant progress this year, and I like to be a part of it.