IBM is huge, and it's hard to give a general impression around the whole company that makes any sense. I can only really speak about CDS (the division Compose is joining and Cloudant is a part of) but I can say it's a really exciting place to work. CDS is about as fast-moving as you can get in a company this large, and the leadership really understands the shift to SaaS. We have a great team and a lot of autonomy to make decisions outside of the general corporate superstructure.
I'm biased but think it speaks highly that Cloudant people (Adam Kocoloski and Derek Schoettle) were tapped to lead this group.
The shared DBs piece has been a tough nut to crack. We decided to release the new dashboard without that piece given how much of an upgrade the rest of it was. The feedback on the new dash has been overwhelmingly positive (except for the shared DBs piece.)
We are working on fixing that piece and completely deprecating the old UI. That change should be coming soon.
For now, this feature will stay a part of the closed-source hosted and licensed products. But remember you can always try it out for free with our Oxygen plan at cloudant.com
We learned of the application about 1 week before the deadline. We threw it together in an afternoon, spent a couple days editing, and turned it in just before the deadline. We basically thought "What the hell?" the worst thing that can happen is we don't get accepted, and then we will have only wasted the time we spent preparing the application. We had no demo and barely a coherent idea, so we focused our application on how awesome the founders were. We basically wanted to show that we were smart and we could build things, we figured that would get us to the interview round (and buy us some time to formulate our idea.)
You should apply even if you have to put the application together today. Just for the experience. At worst, you'll waste an afternoon. At best you'll get in, like we did (Cloudant YCS08 - Boston)
I'll admit it was a bit snarky, and written in haste. You said it much better. He wants to play the role of an objective observer here, almost like an expert journalist. But he definitely has skin in the game.
The disclosure at the bottom is laughable. It should read, "Michael Stonebraker has a strong economic incentive to steer enterprises away from NoSQL. Whenever a company chooses NoSQL, he will lose money. Hence, his opinions should be considered in this light." Oh, and full disclosure, I have a strong economic interest in promoting NoSQL.
Thanks for the kind words jot. The guys behind couch.io are smart and talented, and they really know their couchdb, but I don't think that hosting is their primary focus (they can correct me if I'm wrong).
The main technical difference between us and couch.io is the distribution (clustering) layer we've built. This allows a single couch database to be spread across multiple servers. It provides true horizontal scalability, not just multi-master replication. A database can expand elastically based on resource and concurrency needs. In our next release we'll be adding the ability to tune robustness via quorum constants (a la Amazon's dynamo) on a per-document basis. That should be coming soon.
IBM is a large company that does a lot. They put more money and people towards pure tech than most firms, especially in places like IBM Research.