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IT Trends In and Out of Downturn
An anonymous reader writes "Washington Post has an interesting article talking about how IT industry is changing its business models to survive (IBM: "Pay As You Save"; HP: universal printer driver; Consulting weak; Oursourcing booming), as well as how outsiders view the downturn (Merrill Lynch: it's just another bust after PC and mainframe, but the good thing is, "each 'wave' has so far represented a tenfold increase in the number of technology users."). I'm particularly interested in the outsourcing story. It might explain why IBM will benefit and other vendors like Sun Microsystem which don't have a strong service arm will suffer."
Well, don't ask EDS about it. And IBM seems to be a little sheepish on it, too. Outsourcing IT doesn't appear to be very strong lately, either. I don't know why that'd be focused on as a strength. (Although comparitavely, it isn't THAT bad as other things.)
It has already matured and will continue to do so. IT does not change every day, in fact since I started working in the industry very little has changed. There has been no ground breaking discoveries in a long time, say 15+ years. What has happened is that IT staff are becoming more aware that they have to provide working systems not flashy technology. My employer cares not that we have a character based system but that we never have an unplanned outage.
/., I see more and more IT shops moving to linux. If Linux gets some half decent Open Source vertical applications then companies will flock to it. Why pay $2,500,000 for an ERP package that you have to tailor?
As a side, and this is
Okay, does anyone else see a problem with this? First, an analysis of the tech market from a stock analyst. Second, the analyst in question works for a company under investigation for bogus analysis of market trends(click)? .NET propaganda. Oh wait, I suppose that Merril Lynch is in bed with Microsoft too.
Third, as I don't quite remember the pc boom, or the mainframe boom as being discussed by stock analysts, shortly after whatever previous bust I am even more likely not to believe this. Especially when the speil for the next great major advancement sounds like
From my experience Sun does excellent support. Not that they can touch IBM, but who can ? But both SUN and IBM are miles above HP/COMPAQ in terms of onsite technical expertise, and documentation. Rarely does IBM or SUN ever call in 2nd level, and I've never had them need a 3rd person, the 'NEW' HP guys need an assistant to call in help...It has been a LONG while since I dealt with an HP Unix system so I can't comment on support there.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
This industry is shooting itself in the foot by bringing out a new 'technology' every 7.5 seconds.
Companies might start spending more on Information Technology if there were just a few months stability in the industry such that the media and C*O's can learn what's available, actually understand what things like 'XML' are, what it can do for them etc. and get round to planning ahead.
At the moment, this is industry is doing everything but helping C*O's see ahead by bombarding them with new whiz bang mega hyped new 'technology' all the time.
Let's just chill for a bit.
A little intro, I was one of the many that got laid of in IBM essex last year. There were about 6000 of us in all. Roughly 1/3 - 1/2 the engeniering work force.
IBM will survive because of it's products. Not services. The IBM service model is based entirley on the Hardware that it sells. The reason people are buying into it is because it is like insurance. Pay IBM a smaller amoutn and if anything tragic happens they will fix it. If nothing happens you are not out as much money as if you kept a full time person to deal with your IBM mainfrane systems.
I'm tired and sick (with a cold not mentally) so that's all I have to say. IBM will live or die by it hardware. It's service arm is only part of the PR machine.
How is that an oxymoron (or insightful for that matter). I saved $15 at the grocery store yesterday having spent $50. One of the definitions of save is - "to spend less by." In order for the phrase to be an oxymoron it would have to have contradictory terms. Obviously spend and save are not contradictory. Perhaps next time you think you are making a witty remark you should spend some time doing something else and leave posting for the more intelligent of us.
A big story around here involves CSC laying off a few thousand people who had been working as part of a huge ($1B) contract that involved outsourcing numerous IT functions for United Technologies Corp (UTC). Reading the press coverage, it looks like a classic outsourcing problem: The project scope widens as the competitors bid each other down. Ultimately, some lucky company finds themselves as the winner[?] of a huge obligation to supply all kinds of services for a price may not be realistic. Quite frankly, I find it hard to believe that traditional IT departments could ever waste as much money as the outsourcers claim they can save.
There is a time and place to outsource certain functions, but these comprehensive deals are for the birds. To me, the key is an exit strategy. If you don't have enough non-outsourced resources, you can never fire the outsourcers. You can expect service and price to shift from the ultra-competitive model of the intitial contract to the "gotcha" model of the renewal.
I worked for the State of Connecticut in 1998. At the time, Governor John Rowland was most anxious to outsource all of state government IT. He was already despised by the state labor unions, and this was simply the icing on the cake. Rowland campaigned very hard to convince a skeptical legislature that big money would be saved. In the end, one of the largest outsourcing proposals in history collapsed when Rowland realized that the bidders were promising savings in later years, and there was zero (or negative) savings in the early years. By the time those years arrived, the alleged "savings" would be mostly funny-money comparisions based on hypothetical pie-in-the-sky projections. If Rowland could have saved a single dollar up front, he would have happily taken the deal if for no other reason than to screw the unions. Outsourcing has been a tough sell in this area ever since. When you can't fool the politicians, who is left to fool?
I don't believe outsourcing is foolish (of course I work for an outsourcing company). It depends on what the motives are and as you said, because the company does not have the will to control costs themselves. If you have let your company grow too big for it's britches, as an example, for the company we do break/fix outsourcing for (a large 5 letter chip-making company), outsourcing is a great way to save money on things you really shouldn't have been wasting your time doing in the first place. There is a point where there is so much bureaucracy that you have whole divisions dedicated to supporting your own business, and people collecting compensation based on generous stock/comp plans, who should really be making much less than they are. There are divisions here that charge $120 an hour to their own coworkers! For programming! It costs over $1000/month to have a server hosted internally. And that does not include the price of the server! These are all internal chargebacks. If I was a stockholder I would be pissed that they didn't outsource, or at least get rid of half of their IT staff. The larger a company gets, the more it operates and wastes money like our government. shango
--ngoy
You're correct that the techs shouldn't guess at requirements based on their knowledge of the business. But to imply, as I think you have, that a technical person's knowledge of a business is of no value is silly.
Say you're building an accounting application. Would you as a designer want to know that there are several Asian people on staff, and sometimes they have trouble reading English? Would you like to know that the accounts receivable employee is a woman in her 50's who won't retire for 10 years, was raised on old DOS applications, and is terrified of GUIs? What are the chances of either of these people or groups communicating that to you clearly? Do you think management knows or cares?
There's no substitute for a person on the ground, so to speak. If you plan for the techs to have 0 knowledge of the business then you have to assume that the business is 100% cognizant of itself (for the particular problem domain) and can clearly communicate that knowledge. You must know that never happens.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
Economics tells us that when an entity chooses to specialize and excel at a particular thing, not only does it maximize its own profit potential, but it also makes the competitive environment better through comparative advantage. Why should a widget company develop or even maintain its own technology staff when there are companies out there (pick one, IBM, HP, Microsoft, etc) who produce products and service offerings that will do it better than that company will ever be able to. All the technologists out there I am sure have seen this. Ever worked for or with companies that are out of their league, hire or maintain a technology staff, and almost ALWAYS outsource to consultants in the end because they don't know what they are doing? What the big players are doing is commodotizing this need by providing software packages that don't require ground-up programming. The consultant is still needed to implement and customize, but the "employee" or the "Dilbert" in-house shlep's days are numbered.
GetTheJob.com : Nothing but Real Jobs.
Sun's position in the marketplace is really starting to slide and not having a strong service division is the least of their problems.
I work for a company that is Sun reseller, and recently they have been adding more bureaucracy and "rules" to their resellers. This causes the sales force to waste a lot of time and limits them from achieving a better sales position. Recently Sun "required" us to send a sun certified tech to a new product announcement in a town 8 hours away. This three day trip was a complete waste of time as the same knowledge could be obtained in one hour of reading information off their site and spend the remaining time billing hours to clients.
Sun is also slitting its own throat with their pricing. Several year's ago they use to argue price/performance, which was a strong argument for their products. Now with the improvements and wider sector approval of Linux, they can't make that argument. The only area where they have any strength in the marketplace is the very high end server and possibly security for the types that like to have a company behind a product. There market for the most powerful 5% isn't that small, and I think its only a matter of time before other products overtake them in the price department.
Never say never!
/. Another company needs inventory control, they have this accounting package and they decide to write inventory control, they might even solicite other companies to see if they need inventry control.
When did SAP, BANN et al get created? Did they come ready formed at their present huge size? No, they started off as small packages satisfying one or two areas of need. They then grew to encompass other areas.
No Linux system currently has the name brand of Sun, but what about Linux/390? or whatever the mainframe version is called. Sun has an uphill battle to keep intel out of the high end server market.
Both of the preceeding points are really the same one.
A very common exaample of the same things is that of steel mills. When the US ruled the world of steel there was massive plants churning out steel. Then someone developed the mini mill. These mills did not produce as good steel as the big plants but their steel was cheap. So companies that needed cheap steel and did not need the quality bought steel from the mini mills. The large plants discovered the demand for their low end steel was diminishing so they started to withdraw from the low margin market. All the while mini mills researched how to make better steel cheaply. Thus they started enchroaching on the next level of steel quality and so on and so forth.
Digital cameras are another example. Kodak dismissed digital cameras because the quality was so poor. Pity they didn't understand Moores law exponential growth in digital quality?
I forsee the day when most vertical software is Open Source. Someone or some company decides that it needs an accounting system and decides to write one. They release the code because one of their developers convinces the board that like most companies software is not an asset but a liability to them. Another developer sees this accounting package and thinks it's a good fit for his company if only he can change a few things. So he releases his fixes etc etc. Now this accounting package is rolling along and everything is gelling, hell they even get a mention on
An added bonus for companies that decide to implement this package is that upgrades are free, the demand for expensive developers decreases.
There are already Open Source projects dealing with ERP/CRM.
The answer to this might be succeptible to empirical study. On the one side, some bright, capable people like regular hours and good benefits; on the other some like irregular hours and independence. And - a different question - some may be more bright and capable in the one circumstance than the other.
But the central question is: What business model brings in the best IT people, in whatever formal (or informal) capacity? And on the informal side, if you bring in open source techies, to what extent are they bringing in a large part of the open source community as unpaid accomplices, and how much brilliant capability comes in by that route?
Of course, your business model also has to consist of - well - a business. The .com VC model of "Pile a bunch of sugar here and let the bright, capable ones feed on it, the concentration of them will be enough for success" was stupid, stupid, stupid. Still, given a going business, it's getting the best crew on the oars that matters, not whether their economic relationship to you is that of slaves or sportsmen or enlisted men - except insofar as the relationship type is coherent with engaging a superior crew.
And the faster more business crew effectively, the more their competitors will try to emulate them, and the happier techies in general will be with our prospects - except for the incompetents (many of whom seem to presently have jobs with hosting services) who should be driven out of the field.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
* Vertical Integration is the practice of owning all of the aspects of your business. Rockefeller slaughtered his opposition by buying barrel manufacturing capabilities to store the oil, railroads to transport the oil, etc., all of which lowered his costs and provided a larger degree of control over the major factors immediately outside his core business of selling oil.
I'm constantly amazed at how often businesses don't seem to consider "purchasing" as a viable job title when it comes to their I.T. departments.
The fact is, when you don't assign purchasing and researching tasks to a specific member of your I.T. staff, you end up with a scattered mess of software licensing, fiascos such as the one you described with the bundled system w/19" monitor and RAM upgrade, and many other disasters.
With my previous employer, we had that issue, starting out. It was just generally understood that practically anyone in a salaried position could put in a purchase request, and then their direct manager had to "approve" the order before it was finalized. Seemed simple enough, except people in engineering would always dream up all sorts of hardware and software they "could get lots of use and productivity" out of. Of course, their boss would agree that it "sounded like a good plan" and sign for it. Then, I.T. would get stuck with all the support hassles if the thing wasn't playing nice on our network, didn't work as advertised, or what-not.
Even when we started trying to enforce a more strict policy of "only I.T. purchasing I.T. related goods" - things were still a mess. One person would prefer a certain vendor they used in the past, while another I.T. worker was trying to buy through someone else to keep up a minimum yearly purchase agreement (to lock in a discount).
Something I am seeing in my company, as a CEO and after spending the past year traveling around the midwest talking with other IT staff:
.Net applications and ship huge amounts of money to Redmond.
Java on Linux will lead the industry out of the bust, in at least one area.
1) By providing companies with business systems they can truly own themselves, and are not owned by other companies or cannot be purchased by competitors.
I mean, why pay $22 Million dollars for SAP when you can build your own system, for half the price, with Linux and Java.
Besides, your competitors can't buy what you build. What you do build will be truly an advantage.
2) You say SAP is too complex, too functionally rich to replicate? I say your are right. But most companies don't need SAP, they need a subset of SAP. They also need a system that represents a edge against thier competitors that can't be bought elsewhere.
Something you can get with a Linux and Java solution built homegrown, and probably at half the price.
3) Companies will do it. Why? Because they don't want to upgrade every 2-3 years and invest another million dollars because SAP or Microsoft says so.
The investment is also preserved over the lifetime of the hardware with the simple requirement you need a certified VM for your new target hardware and thats it.
4) Companies want to be able to upgrade when they require it, and when it makes business sense, not when Microsoft shareholders want more money.
This will make costs that are out of control right now, and outside the control of IT oragnizations, very much more controllable from year ot year.
Linux and Java delivers that promise.
In the end, Linux delivers this promise bacause it makes people the important part of this equation.
How?
Well, lots of people ask me how I make money with Linux? They don't seem to understand.
Which, for most of my competitors that wonder how I stay in business month to month, I am quite pleased they don't "Get It" as they gear up to write
Meanwhile, I am paying health insurance benefits, bonuses, and paid vacations to my staff to keep them happy at only $80 bucks an hour for software development. All that and in the state of Wisconsin for that matter. One state that taxes businesses quite brutally I am afraid. (I think we are the top 3 or probably in the #1 spot right now....)
Why? Because I don't have those costs. Which are enourmous in respect to how much I spend on software with Linux and Java for my customers...which is ZERO.
I figured out I must be saving close to $50K per year per programmer by not using Microsoft products for example on one of my customers projects.
The point is, in closing, is that IBM figured it out. More specifically, Lou Gerstner, who you can all thank, if you are a IBM shareholder. If Lou didn't see many of these things comming, almost a decade ago, IBM would be a vastly diffferent company both in size and scope right now.
But like Lou, my company makes money by competiting on the value of your organization, in the open source world, not by:
1) How many units of software I shipped.
2) How many server hardware pieces I shipped.
as the primary revenue stream.
You know what? Thats the LAST thing I think about when doing my companies overall goals and improvements list every year.
Both of the points are out moded methods of producing, manufacturing and basing the future industry of IT on. At least if we want to go from a depression like the US IT market is now experiencing, to another good times market.
What single company is doing more to insure that software and shrink wrap software remains the top reason to buy computers and the status quo remains?
Microsoft.
Microsoft is the enemy of everyone on slashdot who is currently out of work, or is looking to a better economy and better times ahead. More specifically, the 28 billion in cash Microsoft has and what it is doing with it is the real problem.
Why? Because Microsoft desperately knows, that it cannot survive very much longer simply on the desktop if it wants to maintain a monopoly market it worked so hard to legalize in the courts and in dustry.
Instead of leadership at that company that is reorganizing and retooling Microsoft for the future, like Gerstner did for IBM in the 90's, the company is using its vast financial resources to:
1) Buy off congress, judges, and lawyers to rule in thier favor on software rights and patents. I won't go into detail HOW they do this, since they already HAVE done it.
If you have been on Slashdot, and have been keeping tabs, you already know the how.
This is thier first step and it involves the DMCA, EULA's. Specifically attack Linux and free software, and slow it down.
To kill Linux, and the widespread use of software that manages information on the internet they will need something else. Since Linux is free, they can't attack it buy illegally appropriating technology, or through illegal hiring practices or just plain threatening a single entity or startup to scare investors away.
What Microsoft needs, is something equivalent to RAT poison to killoff the vast army of pengiuns.
That poison will come in the form of a harmless DRM law.
But not just any DRM, a friendly to Microsoft DRM is what they are after, and in its current stages, lawyers and judges will provide Microsoft with what it needs to kill not only Linux, but any software produced anywhere in the US that isn't licenses by Microsoft.
What Microsoft is aiming to not just secure its OS, but to secure how information is processed and used.
They won't have to develop anything innovative, they will lets the court system establish precedent and cases, to insure that all future information is only handled by DRM approved systems that make software, handle Email, or browse web pages or process information of any kind.
How?
Simple.
By making it criminal to write free software of any kind. They will do this buy buying off and creating companies that insure information cannot be tranismitted or created without the proper ownership credentials.
They will build into thier OS this requirement, and DRM laws will require that all OS's in the US do the same.
However, the algorithms that implement the DRM, will be owned and licensed by Microsoft, and only Microsoft.
If you create any program or recieve any information created by a Microsoft system, that doesn't have a DRM approved license to determine if you have ownership rights, will be illegal.
You see how this is done? It is done from the desktop, where information is created. That way, all the inroads into the server room can be reversed, and Linux or any free derivative there-of. (BSD, Unix..Macintosh etc.)
Simply because Microsoft knows that is currently the only bastion of its Kingdom not under tremendous erosion right now. This way it can deal with Linux and all competitors, from a position to strength, to dictate how much each of us will pay for DRM right to read/write or create ANY information with our computers.
Sound too incredible to believe? It already is happening, although, what I really mean to say there is already precedent.
It is pretty hard write now to transmit information globally or easily without the USE of Versign certs in a secure way. Sure, you can make your own authority for these scripts, but truth is, it is a pain and is a "so called" security risk.
So Microsoft alread has some precedent to understand how a certain kind of information, that is created can be controlled by one or two companies on such a wide and vast scale.
If you look at how they are approaching this, you can see they are setting themselves up to be the "Versign" of information rights management.
Everyone here agrees, that Verisign is a racket. You pay them for a paper trail. Sure. Tell me though for all this added security, how many equitable "Versign Approved" certs last year do you think were used to rip people off online?
Don't know? Just ask a credit card company or look at your bill the next time you get it.
We are all paying for huge fees on our credit cards just to have the priviledge to use our Credit Cards online.
Doesn't really seem like $300 bucks and all that paper is really helping people or the credit card companies....does it?
Yet Verisign maintains a monopoly. I wonder how they can do that?
Interesting issue isn't it?
It forms many of the foundations for which Microsoft is currently building an attack against everyone here on slashdot, or any user in the world that uses a computer.
Imagine a Microsoft OS that has the same requirements, perhaps in partnership with Verisign, who would make the DRM database.
It would seem Microsoft has all the advantages.
But, for all these, they have one thing against them.
That thing is time and it is a very BIG disadvantage because we are living in a depression time in our industry.
You see, the legal system is not exactly fast, even when you are paying off congressional leaders. Our court system is extremely slow.
You can pay off judges, it has been done before, but I don't think paying off one judge would get Microsoft what it needs like in the AntiTrust case. It needs much more, something almost akin to a law that says you MUST use our software.
But IT in America is showing signs it doesn't want to wait. Many of the people I talk with are ready to chuck thier Microsoft servers and explore alternatives....even on the desktop.
Especially in such hard times.
But the hope for our industry lies in Linux, and where it can take us. To remove cost barriers that many IT professionals have always come to expect or think are requirements to run a business. The hope that people finally become the primary selling and buying points in organizations instead of software and hardware licenses.
Linux is growing by leaps and bounds, and provides a hope for our industry to defeat this madness before it shows up on all our budgets, whether we like it or not because Microsoft makes it illegal to do otherwise.
That is a world I would not want to live in and with a new found hope in Linux and Open Source born of hard times indeed, I think we will avoid it.
When we finally do, a healthy industry of many diversified companies will return, and replace the monopolized, expensive and extremely value poor industry we now have.
Until then, Linux will continue to change the rules, and will offer companies in these uncertain times true value that will allow them to compete on a more sound financial basis when building IT systems as part of a company business model.
Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
..cos Kansas is going bye-bye.
As a reseller you are a middleman, Sun spends the billions on research and development, you reap a large share of the rewards when times are good. During the inflation of the dot-com bubble you helped Sun to keep headcount and warehouse space to a minimum - and your price was a generous discount on Sun hardware and software. Now you are a waste of space. I know of 2 decent Sun resellers in my old vertical market (both of which covered many other markets as well) they provided a tangible value-add - both in terms of technical pre-sales skills, benchmarking facilities and post sales consultancy services. I'm sure they're feeling the pinch at the moment, but I think their customers will return.
If I were running the partner programme at Sun, I would certainly want to weed out the underperforming resellers, especially those who complain about mandatory training sessions. You are a cost of sale and even during the good times your performance was often embarrasing. It's all about value-add, if you're not adding anything other than a customer base for Sun, prepare for those customers to cut out out of the loop and deal direct with Sun.
# init 5
Connection closed.
Oh...
I worked at a Honeywell site in the IT dept. as a lowly tier 2 tech and lost my job (along with about 30 other people) when the reigning CEO thought it would be a swell idea to outsource IT to IBM due to all the money Honeywell would "save". (Well, actually Allied Signal would be saving money but that's another issue all together)
I didn't work there long as I had just recently found myself in need of work after being laid off from my "real" job at an avionics firm, but in my brief stay at Honeywell the first thing I noticed was how utterly helpful the help desk and IT dept was. I have never seen end users recieve such royal treatment anywhere and of course that all changed when the transistion started. What normally would take us anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours to correct soon became a "guaranteed 72 hour response time" courtesy of IBM's superior service. Keep in mind this could be something as simple as resetting a users password from my desk because they failed to remember it (very common and takes about 10 seconds to fix) but this was now a "Priority 1" problem for IBM which contractually could take up to 72 hours to fix.
Unfortunately CEOs seldom see anything beyond dollar signs and are easily convinced by the bean counters that outsourcing is a sound idea. IBM offered about two thirds of the IT staff jobs, and Honeywell's policy was that if we were offered at least two-thirds our current salary we either had to accept the offer or lose our jobs AND our severance packages. Naturally IBM wanted me and the others low on the totem pole but had no use for those with 20+ years experience... because they didn't want to pay them for their knowledge no doubt.
I'm done venting but to me it seens painfully obvious that outsourcing IT is a bad idea unless your IT department is the worst ever because in the couple of instances I've seen it happen it resulted in a much lower level of service and IMHO IT is not where you want to cut corners. It may seem like a nice way to make your numbers look better but in the long run I believe it will be a costly mistake.
Most of the Linux work that I've observed is being implemented by hacks and amateurs in a hurry and trying to save a buck.
This will turn around and bite the Linux community pretty hard. Be prepared for a major backlash as companies start getting burned by poor implementations...
I do not believe in general, in a T.C.O. (total cost of ownership) savings by going to Linux. The true cost is in systems administration, intellectual property, and data. Hardware, OS, and COTS Apps are not significant by comparison.
So now we have amateur hack systems which aren't realizing significant cost savings.
This spells trouble brewing for Linux.
--
ps - I am a professional linux system administration consultant. I am trying my dangdest to keep the above predictions from coming true - but I fear the worst.
O=='=++
....and don't believe extreme industry specific experts to make accurate and broad prognostications outside their field which encompass the entire socio/economic paradigm. for a very basic example right now, the worlds and in particular US's economic outlook in general is dismal. all this new and improved sexy IT stuff is still coming, looks promising, all the trends you cite are accurate... BUT--our financial system is in danger of total collapse. Derivative exposure just with the top banks is somewhere between 50 to 100 TRILLION dollars. More or less this means there's that sum's difference betwen digital theoretyical wealth and what exists in reality. Ask joe blow programmer maybe what a derivative is, ask his boss, then his boss. You won't get a good answer until you make it to someone who is extemely economic savvy, ie, another industry expert in that field. Our tech boom could fall flat as soon as the dollar drops to a perceived and factual international balance of payments level of 20% of what it is now-and it just could happen. Here's another, we got this deal called 'war", just as a forinstance, what happens to all that consumer oriented "normal life" tech postulation should there be widespread biological warfare or even just a little "whoops, sorry boss, the little buggers escaped". This is not an unlikely scenario within the next decade, or heck, even the next month or year. Baby nukes? Is it really outside the realm of possibility? What happens to nation/world if a small one goes off in manhattan or washington or san fran or london or berlin? There's no real answer except from the trolls, and they don't count, that's why they have that description. Who knows, but I think for people 100% counting on some sort of IT tech boom job as their single only source of income or "life" in general and then willy nilly go into serious debt thinking the good times are right around the corner and nothing else matters but their particular niche field might be severely dissapointed near or medium term. Chaos theory mostly, wild cards, something not really addressed in bugtraq.
I am not negatively cricisng, just pointing out the big picture scenarios are better dealt with (historically proven more or less) by the big picture guys and not extreme one field specialists.
I'll give you an anecdotal. I used to work auto industry in detroit, late 60's. You couldn't find one person uaw lowest grunt worker to any management level who thought japan would ever be any sort of threat to market share, it just plain didn't exist. It was laughable. Whoops, guess it wasn't.
Now use same history and track record and apply it to the IT field, or any other for that matter. Wildcards come into play that none of those specific experts hardly ever take into account, and because they are wild, and maybe don't exist yet, it's not even possible, but human nature has shown one 100% certainty, they ALWAYS happen. wildcards always get played, any industry, anyplace. some are simply revolutionary and cognitive dissonance sets in across an entire field. The slang term is "murphy's law" and is applicable on any scale you care to look at.
Myself, see no big boom or the economy (very broadly speaking here) getting better, in fact, I see it getting steadily worse(this would take way too much to go into in a small post) on a dropping curve for around 10-20 years, with a 50/50 chance of global heavy warfare inside that time frame. That's only my 2 cents as a generalist. My speciality is loosely descibed as generality on this, to see trends and patterns large and small scale. Threat/problem analysis and mitigation. And in advance.
Games, gadgets and widgets will still make some money,as long as there are consumers to buy them, but they will be gradually replaced with basics of human and national survival, food, energy, healthcare etc. People not working aren't buying. People working for 1/2 what they were working for a few years ago have learned their lesson, but still aren't buying. Nations that think they can become and stay wealthy by only trading wealth and not by producing any have always failed. That's just historic reality, not even hidden anywhere. Companies will do this as well, if they even manage to stay afloat, and with most corporation's widget debtload and huge pension debtload, this is an extreme crapshoot. Look at the fortune 500 companies pension demand they are staring at, which they almost all have borrowed against. It's sorta nasty looking in the not so far distant future there. It's going to cause profound social changes, eveen if they strip the CEOS millions, because the wealth needed for these pensions and healthcare simply does not exist. It ain't there. It's chimeric. Sure, some insane bufoon like sir alan g. can order more funny money created, still won't do much if the prices for everything go up faster than they can keep up with inflationary digits, pick any current south american country now for examples of how fast reality can change. and bankers and brokers are the very worst generally speaking, they get their start by first force feeding themselves at the beginnings of their careers the big lie of what wealth is, that it is just some object that can be conjured out of the air or something, and base their decisions on that lie. And that is EXACTLY why the worlds economy is on shaky grounds now, absolutely no sound base, the walls are pretty, the foundation was made out of cotton candy. Institutionalised "not looking". (nothing personal against any bankers here, btw, you were taught this lie as the truth)
Any secure tech (job) longer-range advances might be more related to those more human-practical and necessary fields then new and improved blinkenlights, ie. That is my recommendations to geekatroids, and diversify, at least two widely disparate incomes, and paper/electronic "savings" or "investments" do not count as "income" until after it's spent on something.
I guess that is what you see. It exists, I don't dispute that. But in quantity as compared to hacks I have seen in the Windows world, it occurs far more often, with much more devastating results for IT organizations with windows for the following reason:
:-)
Linux intrinisically requires a person to have a greater understanding of the science and operational aspects of a computer than Windows does.
What we have to think about here is that a BAD thing?
This requires a greater energy input to learn, and as a result, most Linux people usually come with a greater understanding automatically of the hows and whys of not how to do certain things a particular way.
Windows XP makes things so simple, that most people can setup services and do things easily, without understanding WHY they shouldn't.
This is because Redmond is attempting to put every single possibility of building IT systems into a bunch of dialog boxes built as part of a two directional decision tree governed by OK and CANCEL buttons and anything else the OS makes the decision GRATIS.
Linux has a very different approach and it DOES require a greater input of time and energy.
Is this bad? I am not sure, you decide but here is why:
It doesn't attempt to make anything easy or hard.
What Linux attempts to do, is make the person administrating the server directly responsible for its operational aspects/details, far more so than Windows.
This philosophy embodies 2 things:
1) The person can make the decisions much better than the OS.
2) Give the person the tools to enable his decisions via computer programming or systems language to manage his enterprise.
Very very different philosophy. I like this one better. Primarily because these program snippets can be contributed back into the user community as part of a "Best Administrative Practices" and can be refined by the Admins of Linux as well, because they get access to the source.
So, I guess I see poorly designed systems on the Windows side of things much more than the Linux side.
Except that, with Windows, the poor designs are primarily a result of Windows software, because of the fact that Windows tries to do everything for you, and as such must make a large number of Admin decisions for you.
The result is bad decisions and poor implementations, not just in Administrative side of the Windows OS but also in the software side as well.
What is ironic is the fact that high performance systems as defined by most Windows Admins is expense and security.
For Linux Admins it is speed and uptime.
At least that is what I get when I ask respective Admins what is most important.
So I think you can put your mind at ease and that hacks should be few and far between in our field.
(But don't quote me on that...stupid people do what stupid people can do.)
Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.