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."

Comments

Economist's imbalanced perspective

[stanwirth]

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.

• Data auditing for all those firms that are trying very hard not to crash and burn in an Enron-like blaze.
• Data auditing for all those firms now subject to far stricter regulatory regimes-- for financial firms, in their accounting data, and for pharmaceuticals, in their FDA compliance.
• Database integration for those firms that bought up the dregs of the others.
• Database integration to pull together data from different state and federal agencies for tracking criminals and terrorists.
• Data forensics for doing the background work necessary to do the aforementioned database integration.
• Data security -- well because hackers be.
• Data warehousing to pull all the pieces together into an integrated picture of the whole. Ever see a business analyst try to do a join between two multimillion-row tables in Access? It's a real hoot.

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.

We all knew this didn't we?

[darrowj]

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.