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IT Growth: Exponential No More
BreadMan writes "The Economist has has an article about growth in the IT industry coming off a period of unsustainable growth. Compares IT to growth industries of the past like railroads and automobiles."
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Umm, how long have you been getting that CCNA? At RPI, I got one in one semester. The next semester I got my CCNP. I don't even list them on my resume, though, because I don't think certifications are really worth anything without experience.
I'm getting about as tired of these stupid on-again off-again IT economy articles as I am about my hotmail spam telling me I can increase my manhood safely and naturally.
:-)
Hey, guess what: The economy sucks right now, things in general are nearly stagnant, and we're still making up for the excesses of the "dot-com era".
It's gonna be a couple of years at lest until the IT field picks up again. It will pick up again, and it will continue to be a viable industry with good paying jobs for people with knowledge, skill, and experience. Will it ever be as good as it was in the 90's? Probably not... but who knows... There are a lot of things on the horizon that could have dramatic effects on our economy... some good, some bad (I'm speaking for the U.S.A.; not sure about other places.).
One thing in particular that comes to mind as a GOOD effect is the Fair Tax Initiative ( http://www.fairtax.org )... The Fair Tax Initiative has been around for several years now, but more recently, it has been formally brought up as a recommendation to President Bush by his economic team, and while he did not say if he thought Fair Tax was the way to go, he did say that he thought the Federal Income Tax System was broken beyond repair...
The reason I mention this is due to the flood of IT jobs overseas... Why is that I wonder?
Think about this: the USA has THE HIGHEST corporate taxes in the ENTIRE WORLD. Who do you think gets stuck actually paying for those taxes (in one form or another)? The corporations? Hah... on paper, yes, but the cost is passed down to the consumers and to the employees by way of higher prices, lower wages, lesser benifits, etc.
If something the the Fair Tax were to pass here in the US, people would have to HIDE in order not to find jobs... prices of goods would go down, people would have more power over where their money went, and best of all, (as the name says) the TAXATION WOULD BE FAIR! There's quite a lot to the plan... and it really would be an amazing thing with nothing but positive implications to our economy...
Yeah... so that was quite a tangent... anyway... the point is, these kinds of articles are repetitions, short-sighted, and suffer from severe tunnel vision, as there is certainly more to "predicting" the future sucess or failure of an industry than just looking at timelines of other industries. There are MANY factors that contribute to the economical outcome of one thing or another. An economy is much like an ecosystem... one can't say that they think a specific species is going to die out in another X years, just because a completely different species did the same thing several decades ago... there are just too many contributing factors for one to make an accurate prediction. Articles like this are basically just FUD... and it seems like every time some dope wrights one up, it makes its way to slashdot... go figure.
Oh yeah, and go to http://www.fairtax.org
So a lot of people will go unemployed, some businesses go broke. So what? It helps weed out all the fakes, all the "in-it-for-the-big-bucks" jerks.
I'm a computer science student, and I can't begin to describe just how many people are looking to get into this field just for the money. More than 90 % of my fellow students hate programming. No, I'm not exaggerating.
I myself love programming and learning new things about computers and related fields, and I don't care at all about the money. I just love computers - and for people like I hope there will always be jobs
IT is not one industry or one technology, and I have personally survived two prior boom/bust cycles in IT, both undiscussed in the Economist article. First it was mainframes, then it was workstations, this one it was PC's, and sure, if we follow that trend, the next wave will be PDA's, but not as we know it.
Each wave involved computers that were roughly as powerful as those of the previous generation. When workstations could do the work of mainframes, workstations were the cool new thing, and there was a major shake-out in the mainframe sector, while the workstations took some time to get going, and the big iron was relegated to do things that only big iron could do (eg handle big databases, MSRP systems, billing systems, etc). Then workstations and mini-mainframes (starting with PDP-11's, VAXen, then on to Sun, Appollo, SGI...) were king for half a decade. Remember the anti-trust suit against IBM? Remember when DEC pulled out ahead of IBM? Kinda like Linux starting to pull out ahead of Windows during the anti-trust suit agains MS. Same s**t, different decade.
After the crash of '87, a lot of the startups in silicon valley that were writing software primarily for Sun and SGI workstations started seeing their marketshare get gobbled up by the rise of the PC Clone -- which offered a much cheaper OS (DOS) and much cheaper hardware to do it on. While the applications that used to run on big iron have been moved first to the ever more powerful UNIX servers in the back room and are now being moved onto PC's running Linux...because they can.
Can we extrapolate the trends we saw in the last two boom/bust cycles and say that the next wave of innovation will be PDA's with an easily programmed OS (symbian?) talking to servers running linux at the home office or corporate HQ? Sounds good to me.
Right now the name of the game in the last gasp er I mean "deployment phase" of the current wave is "Pick up the Pieces" (Brecker Brothers' wailing in the disco in the background).
In more specific terms this means: Data auditing, database integration, data forensics, data security and data warehousing.
But being able to access your company data over a secure connection with your PDA -- it's sort of happening now, but, extrapolating from the trends of the last two waves, this would logically be the next one. PDA's are where PC's were 10 years ago, PC's are where workstations were 10 years ago, and workstations are where mainframes were 10 years ago. "Where" as in terms of size, functionality, maturity of the code base, special security, power and AC requirements -- and, consequently, where they sit in organisations.
Seems logical, but then, a lot of things do.
Wasn't it nice to get rates of $300 an hour?
Have a company sign a contract to spend 6 million dollars on a web site?
Allow 40% of our project to fail?
I think it is about time that we realized that business is business and we aren't that special. Either we make money for people, one way or another, or we don't work. I don't think this is a bad thing. I think this is an opportunity to step up and honestly make the world a better place with IT. The free ride is over and it has gotten and will get ugly. However, this is my career and I'm not turning back. I have invested too much of myself in it to let it go.
For about 20 years, you've been able to buy PC clones. DRAM has been a commodity for decades, too. Software has more market segmentation, but UNIX variants (Linux, BSD, SCO, whatever) are a commodity.
There are many companies here just waiting for a few extra bucks in the bank to upgrade both their hardware and software.
So, IMHO the slow down in the biz is due to a pathetic economy since we changed presidents. In the Clinton years the U.S. economy had money to burn and a fat surplus. Now our people are practically burning furniture to keep warm and living off credit cards in deficit land.
Moore's Law would still be cooking if we had money. As soon as there is a little cash in the drawer our customers are going to be upgrading.
Harpo Tunnel Syndrome--my wrist feels funny.
You've stumbled upon the real solution, it does indirectly relate to population. There is limitless potential for the creation of value in a world where the amount of human knowledge is allowed to grow without limits.
Allow me to explain. All value is created by human knowledge. A clear example is the value of copper. If we did not know that copper was useful, there could be so much copper in the world that we were tripping over hunks of it on the sidewalk, and it would continue to be worthless. Yet as soon as someone realized things could be made from copper, it would become quite useful to humans and therefore valuable.
It is the same way with all other value. Human knowledge creates it. Humans have nearly unlimited wants - Once you satisfy one, we immediately move on to another. Knowledge of how to satisfy more human wants is what creates value. Therefore, the more people we have using their brains to figure things out, the better our wants will be fulfilled.
We say economic growth has happened when the value of all the things we were provided with has increased over time, that is to say, in general, our wants were fulfilled increasingly better with time. This is a natural progression as certain problems of providing for our wants are solved, allowing us to use our brains (the most valuable resource we have is time spent thinking of solutions to problems) to solve the problems that remain. Economic growth is therefore a good indicator of whether society is on the right track to fulfilling the wants of its members.
Unless you what you want is to not have what you want, in which case I say you are perverse.
I think there will be these technologies that will revive the tech sector:
1. IPv6. Let's face it: using routers, subnetting, etc. to extend the life of IPv4 addressing can only take you so far. With more and more devices being Internet-accessible, the massively-larger pool of IPv6 addresses will make Internet connectivity of your home entertainment center, home office and various home appliances much easier, not to mention giving IP addresses to your various handheld devices! The problem is that many of today's installed routers and Internet backbone wiring are not ready to support IPv6, and it will require lots of hardware upgrading (and also software upgrades) to get IPv6 support on a wide scale.
2. 3G cellular telephones. Today's latest picture-enabled cellphones are only beginning of things to come; we will eventually include true broadband (384 kilobits per second data transfer rates and faster) over standard cellphone networks, which could end up competing with 802.11b/g wireless connections but 3G could offer more reliable connections with less issues of interference. Again, there will be a need to upgrade the cellphone infrastructure to support full broadband 3G operations.
3. High-Definition TV. We're only beginning the rollout of 720p/1080i digital television with picture quality far superior to today's NTSC standards. By 2010, 720p/1080i 16:9 aspect ratio digital TV signals will be delivered by over-air broadcasts, through your cable line and through small satellite dishes all over the USA on a large scale. Again, this will require large-scale sales of new 16:9 aspect ratio TV sets, sales of new hardware to support upgraded TV broadcasting infrastructure needed for HDTV, and new production hardware sales (cameras, video recorders, video editing facilites, etc.) for broadcasters to handle HDTV.
In fact, by 2010 people will be wondering how quaint IPv4, voice only cellular phone, and NTSC-standard 4:3 aspect ratio TV are. =)
I beleive M$ is big enough to survive frustrated geeks ranting against it's monopoly abuse.
By your use of the idiotic dollar sign, I can already tell that the rest of your post will be moronic drivel that has no valid basis. But I will humor you for a time.
You're most certainly right describing IE6 as an indesputable innovation: finally the masses are bestowed the privilege of cookie monitoring!
The question was when Microsoft last updated IE. I answered it.
Next.
Windows XP hmm, W2K used to freeze when waking up the hard disks...
Upgrade your drivers.
only one would, mouse froze, reboot; oh and a laptop in standby would wake up (lid closed) randomly... very cool when carrying in a case in the boot of a car.
Fix your laptop. Nobody else has these problems. You should have seen the "fun" I had with Red Hat 9 on this laptop I'm typing on. Puts your anecdotal FUD to shame.
XP certainly did solve the problem... just a couple of BSODs though, and the SP1 slowdown-crawl detail.
I have never seen a Windows XP BSOD, and the slowdown-crawl has to do with SP1's new memory management scheme and doesn't affect everybody, hence the lack of a critical update available for download. One had to request it specifically from Microsoft.
Next.
"Sufferin' succotash."