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Pointless IT Innovations Considered Harmful
Makarand writes "According to a comment column in the guardian innovations in IT are most often simply more trouble than they are worth. Most innovations in IT today are platform specific and are easy to
come up with in the computing fields. Innovating gets easier if the platform sticks around
for a long time. These innovations accrue incompatibilities making it difficult for users to switch platforms and absorb the costs of switching to a new platform. Users will not switch to
a competitor's product if they believe that their platform will be later updated to deliver the same benefits."
Are the companies that need the continous cash-flow of selling the latest upgrade every couple of years. (Naming no names. :)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
innovations in IT are most often simply more trouble than they are worth
I see this everyday. Not just in the areas that they are talking about in the article. I see it most commonly on enterprise applications.
For example a company will have a mainframe based app that they have used for years through a terminal emulator. Everyone knows how to use it and flies through the application often typing several screens in advance. But, some bright spark thinks that green screens are passe and insists on "updating" the application. They spend LOTS of money developing some gui database application or, worse yet, some browser based interface to the application.
Suddenly, the application is slower than molasses, going up hill on a cold day. No one knows how to navigate the new interface and productivity takes a major dive.
Naturally, the bright sparks asssume the problem is old hardware and spend another fortune upgrading equipment to get performance back to where it was before. It's a total waste of time and money, not to mention that it pisses off the user community in a major way.
Is the tension between "innovation" and compatability. Nothing new there.
from the story
" Which isn't to say that the ThinkPad was not innovative. However, the innovations came in things like colour and finish, screen size, the new TrackPoint pointing device and short-lived "butterfly keyboard", bundled software, price (low by IBM standards), marketing and support. The ThinkPad innovated in areas that were valued by customers, and customers were therefore prepared to pay for them. However, it did it without departing too far from accepted industry standards, which would have made customers reject it as "incompatible". Lesson learned."
I have seen very few end users even *THINK* about future compatability if it has the bells and whistles they want/need today. Quite frankly the typical customer does not see WHY there should be so much problem: I've never heard a good reason why the new software can't at least do what the old software did the same way it did it; pretty piss poor UI design in their opinion. Unless one has a Microsoftian stranglehold why should anyone upgrade to new stuff that deosn't work as well as the old stuff; 'working well' being defined by the end user, not the IT department (who exists to serve the end user, not the other way around)
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."
Actually, though, the big value added with Linux will, for the foreseeable future, be the assurance that you will not get sucked into some long term recurrent license fees.
This shows a remarkable lack of insight into how similar things today are to a few decades ago. A few decades ago we had IBM mainframes and terminals with local blockmode editing; today we have web servers and PC's with web clients with form-filling capability. Are the PC's capable of much more? Yes. Are they often used to do much more? No, not really. The only real difference (ignorning frilly graphics) is that Internet Exploder and Netscrape crash a whole lot more often than a 3270-type mainframe terminal :-)
Eventually this corrodes the QA from "it still has a few bugs" to "the customers won't vomit at first sight, and we'll have 80 megs of patches next week". Very bad practice for the software and the soul.
I think this lack of upgrade cycle deadline fever is a big plus on the Linux/Open side.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
The article's point, IMHO, is that change for change's sake is not good. Sometimes change is clearly the right thing to do - for example, replacing job-control language with a modern operating system is (usually) the right thing to do, as is replacing assembly language with a high-level language for writing applications. The gains in reliability and maintainability make the effort worthwhile. However, change just for the sake of change is often - usually? - leads to a degredation of reliability and maintainability, rather than the other way around. Companies that pursue a will'o'the'wisp often rush into a bog. The point is, it's not too much to ask managers to perform some basic cost-benefit analyses before they sign onto the latest fad.
[this
it was nice as long as it was a flourishing
community of hackers in true spirit [like the
MIT AI lab, the "altair" revolution etc]
the more and more IT has become mainstream the
trend seems towards dumbing down towards
the common good and innovation has been quite
slow relatively [or at least purely based on
"consumer demand" which is defined by the "market survey" folks].
i think this is the case for any industry.
an industry maturing generally tampers the
speed of superb innovation found in its
initial stages. except in the case of IT the hype has been much more and the effects global.
thanks for reading,
vv
The article is from the Guardian. I don't see it on the Reg site.
While "[t]he chances of a company changing platforms in any given year is very fucking slim", we don't rewrite our apps every year, or every five, and large apps can live forever (witness the COBOL programmers dragged out of retirement for Y2K, etc.). Cross-platform compatibility makes sense.
Also, larger organizations already maintain a mix of servers (Windows/UNIX/Linux) and cross-platform (i.e., non-MS-specific) code allows for flexiblity.
This should come as a siprise to no one. 'innovation' is the strategy by which platform vendors differentiate themselves in a bid for greater market share. It's beneficial to the vendors so we won't see this sort of thing end any time soon. It locks their customers into tyheir platform for the long haul, which is why you will never see the same 'innovation' made to all or even several platforms at the same time. Leveraging innovation to facilitate greater synergy is the IT industry's answer to advertising verbage such as 'new and improved' you often see on any consumer product marketing materials. It certainly is harmful, but it isn't going to stop any time soon. There was something of a backlash to ptoptietary innovation back in '98 and '99 so vendors began to work more with open standards, as a half measure to apease consumers. Microsoft is a good example of this. Their strategy to 'embrace and extend' open standards, to again differentiate their product offerings has worked out extremely well to date. It certainly isn't ideal for the IT consumer, but this is where modern marketing and business practices meet the IT industry's little piece of the world-wide technology market.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
They obviously have the same playbook, and we all know which one: "#199. I will not make alliances with those more powerful than myself. Such a person would only double-cross me in my moment of glory. I will make alliances with those less powerful than myself. I will then double-cross them in their moment of glory."
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
it's wrong in the way that the words 'innovation' and 'pointless' are used and defined. Innovation, in and of itself, is not bad at all. It is the product or process or idea that has no merit, or is realized to have no value. But even with those *without* any value to it creators, the public can, and does, benefit (sometimes greatly) from that exercise. Example: the innovation that ANYTHING could be sold on the internet. or the innovation that brought about the idea and business model solely resting on advertising revenue. did it work ? no. did people lose their jobs, and billions of dollars ? yes. but that doesn't mean that the exercise was "pointless"...to the contrary, the current environment is now able to change and better predict future ideas on these precedents. "pointless" is a word that is not only subjective, but I would say incorrect in this article. Replace the word "pointless" with "sometimes doesn't produce something that the originators can't make money from".
Today's ERP systems (SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle, etc) suffer from the exact same problem: they promise you the moon (and many times actually deliver it), but once you depend on it you're completely stuck with it. In the case of SAP (and the same case happens to other ERP systems) if later you want to change something it's going to cost you big. Plus you usually pay very high consulting and maintenance fees.
.Net.
The same can be said of other packaged applications which do not make public their data storage formats and/or communication protocols.
This is why I think it is such a big deal to have (1) a true cross-platform executable platform (i.e.: java), (2) a true cross-platform communications protocol and data interchange (i.e.: XML), and whenever possible (3) a comprehensible and standards-compliant-as-possible data repository (i.e.: mySQL, Postgress).
Note that regardless of the article being viased or not 9as some other readers here point out), the reality is that many IT managers are beginning to realize this now. This is why the huge push to Linux, Java, PHP, and XML, and many Open-Source technologies.
It is also why Linux, XML, and J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) has had such a success, and why many IT managers are thinking twice about Microsoft
I don't think so.. I think the author is basically saying that people choose conservatively and are annoyed by innovations that don't actually add value
/. readers.
The author points to two examples (microchannel bus and Motorola 68K) which did, in fact, add value but were not widely accepted because of the cost of adopting an incompatible new technology.
More generally, he also discusses how it is easy to introduce innovation that improves a technology given the experience of that technology (the 20/20 hindsight rule) and talks about the circumstances in which an incompatible standard has produced a market shift. That said, this article appears to me to be about the trade-off of innovation versus established standards, a concept that should be pretty obvious to most
But you're right about there being nothing about "pointless innovation" in the article, which gets back to the part of the point I was originally trying to make: where the hell did this headline come from?
Your comment exemplifies a major cause of the problem. The PC-based, Java only, mind view of so called "architects" are incapable of solving problems without using the platforms that they are familiar with. If a data format is your problem, fix the data format. Todays mainframes are perfectly capable of interfacing / integrating with any hardware / software platform. Yet, when faced with such problems, these "architects" apply the only hammer (PC solutions and Java designs) that they know off to the nail.
I'm not sure why these people reach architect level positions. Just the other day, one of these architects was advocating Adobe Distiller as a cost saving solution, when GNU/Ghostscript solves the same problem (converting .ps to .pdf) for much much less. Another one was re-architecting an asynchronous application to use SOAP when the existing email based solution had no known problems (other than it used a technology (sendmail and PERL) that the Java-only architect didnt want to learn about.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
But on that day that the ground moves under you, all that "lock in" suddenly turns around and bites you. Until now, the idea of going all Microsoft was good. All the Office products work well with each other, they work well with the OS. But now that plus is turning into a minus. If you want to keep using Office, you have to accept the next OS from Microsoft. You can't keep using what you have now. And if you have to make a change, why not look around? And if you know that everyone else is thinking twice, think three times!
Microsoft benefited from the last Great Change when Win 3.0 took off. Suddenly all the kings of the DOS world suffered a Reality Reset and had to compete on a new playing field. Microsoft's playing field. Why not switch from Word Perfect and Lotus 1-2-3 if you're changing the "OS"?
We live in interesting times.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
when the author provides us with a perfect formula for predetermining viable innovations vs inviable ones I'll take his assertions more seriously.
you'll notice that his examples of gratuitous , and supposedly damaging , innovations ( IBM , Motorola ) were both squelched by the market. Heaven forbid the Guardian acknowledge the utility of market forces.
Of course innovation isn't always a good idea. As a common sysadmin's saying goes: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".
That doesn't mean there should be no innovation at all; however, most "innovations" from commercial software writers are just there to make you open your wallet, not to improve the quality of your IT-infrastructure.