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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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Then maybe the growth was a log function, or sigmoidal.
But most journalists couldn't care about growth models. To them, anything that is "big" or "fast" is considered exponential.
I suggest you read Slashdot
You mean this powerpoint course I just took won't make me a millionaire?
Why didn't anybody tell me that you actually need some useful skills to be happily employed in this industry?!
The article talks about IT in terms of HARDWARE - Moore's Law - i.e. the doubling of processor speed every two years.
A neat graph shows the typical lifecycle of any technology from 'irruption' (sic) through to 'maturity', closely followed by the 'next great surge'
LINUX - THE NEXT GREAT SURGE !
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
What bothers me is that they assume that "IT" is one technology. In fact it is several, and I'd assume that most of them have not been discovered. It's not that long ago when Internet wasn't in the radar of The Economist reporters...
\Ir*rup"tion\, n. [L. irruptio: cf. F. irruption. See Irrupted.] 1. A bursting in; a sudden, violent rushing into a place; as, irruptions of the sea.
People can only view so much porn..
Yes it's back to slide rule for you. Computers just didn't work out, so now we're just going to give up on them entierly.
Whatever, the world will continue to cram computers into more and more random devices and network them all together. Can your tivo talk to your cell phone? It should, and I'm sure one day it will. And all along the way there will be companies doing such things, making a lot of money in the process.
So don't give up on the IT market just because you can no longer find a job as a Novell admin anymore.
Chin up slashdoters.
-makoffee
According the graph (supplied by Intel), processors back in 1960 had one transistor each. They probably didn't have a very extensive instruction set.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Sure, explosive growth isn't going to continue in any industry that has reached relative maturity. It's far from doom and gloom, however, and the article doesn't discuss one of the most important effects of IT buildups.
While there's no question much of the economy's boom was based on hype, there are still real, bottom line reasons for strength -- and numero uno, IMHO, is the strong growth in productivity. IT-related expenditures get a lot of credit for this growth.
Railroads and automobiles aren't fair comparisons, because they are essentially 'fixed-function.' Once you can ship things anywhere inexpensively, what else will drive railroad growth? "A little faster" isn't a fundamental change. Unlike these examples, IT infrastructure is constantly evolving, adding new ways to increase productivity.
For example, "B2B" exchanges are no longer flashy, but still growing like crazy and boosting efficiency. There are many other applications with strong potential but currently limited real-world usage, such as e-learning, knowledge management, and video conferencing -- and plenty more great ideas still being dreamed up.
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
The IT industry is still growing. It's just growing in third-world countries, so greedy CEO's who are already obscenely compensated can pocket even more by using sweat-shop labor. (Think textiles and the garment industry - nothing new.)
When was the last time Microsoft released a new version of Internet Explorer? I believe it was back before they had 90% or more market share. Hmm. What a coinicidence.
When was the last time that Microsoft significantly improved their desktop OS? That would be Windows 95. Back when Microsoft was facing competition from OS/2 for that business.
When was the last time that Microsoft significantly improved their server OS? Well, you can debate that one, but it's obvious that Microsoft even today faces stiff competition from Linux, BSD, and other Unix variants.
And speaking of lack of competition, we all know the real reason why fiber to the home (the last mile) is taking so long: local telephone monopolies. This is true in the USA and in other countries. Once people can get fiber to the home, the so-called "bandwidth glut" will disappear in a hurry.
There is a lot more innovation that can take place. The biggest area IMO is wireless. The small, handheld wireless device market is certainly not mature. One of the things to look for is cell phone/PDA convergence, which hasn't been done sufficiently well yet. It's not just all-in-one devices, however. We should also look for new functionality in devices.
Content distribution is still the toughest business. Unless you have a world-class product like the Wall Street Journal, it's difficult to charge money for information. The best solution is to sell not just information, but add on something else. This something else could be a service like ad-blocking or a set number of minutes of professional advice or consulting, or a tangible product like a poster or a toy. Don't just sell Harry Potter on the web. Sell a bundle of a Harry Potter book together with a unique poster or action figure. That sort of thing.
In short, the future is very bright. Microsoft's monopoly will not last forever, even if the US government refuses to do anything about it.
A-Bomb
It really does come down to market economics. As the workplace shrinks, what used to be an employees market becomes an employers market - there are more suitable persons per job. Ergo it is harder to get a job, you have to be better qualified in all sense, and you get paid less.
And there isn't much one can do about. A votre sante and good luck.
purabalas?!?
PARABOLAS.
I appreciate the humor that this unbelievable misspelling was followed up 2 sentences later with "Not that I wanted to go to college anyway".
Sure, buddy. You didn't want to.
"Sigmoidal" is not present in "Dumb and Dumber's Fifth Grade Word Looker-Upper" and therefore should not be used in your post. "Exponential" does mean "big big" according to the looker-upper, and "journalists" should be replaced with "writer downers."
The preceding changs will make your post suitable for reading by the 97% of our society. The remain 3%, illiterate and UNIX Wizards, don't buy stuff; therefore they aren't a usefull part of society and can be ignored.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
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.
No big surprise - Management had to wake up eventually.
In addition many computer systems and networks have reached a level of complexity that can no longer be serviced / designed / maintained by an MCSE or some kid who took a few HTML classes at the local community college. Its true that anyone can "throw" a network together - and as my boss often says, "when you want it bad, you get it bad..." At my place of employment, engineers are actively involved in serious systems design and modeling of our networks (before they are deployed) - they are not shopping out of a Black Box catalog and hoping it all plays together.
The parent post makes a good point, and I would add the following - time for less quantity and more quality...
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.
In this case it may simply be demand outstripping supply. Computers today are really, really fast. The constant pressure to get the latest and best machine is no longer anywhere near as strong as it used to be, since for almost all applications, computers are "fast enough." (The main industry still pushing the envelope is, of course, the gaming industry.)
For the last few years, Intel and the other chip manufacturers have been starting to falter, probably because people are really coming to realize that they don't need the latest and greatest chip to do what they need to do. So the slump may be simply due to economics rather than hitting some kind of technological plateau.
..is that you're foolish to beleive that a job as a programmer or engineer is going to be really hard to find. If you are low skilled, say just a Java programmer or something like that...you know the type, then sure, it may be bleak. But think about all the devices that are out and even more coming out that need EE people to make, programmers to program etc. Perhaps being a network guy or sys-admin is going to be harder to come across but I think the future is going to be even greater for programmers, at least programmers with a good foundation such as a CS degree or by someone who is enthusiastic and self taught.
Think about it, PC's will soon be the smallest market for IT, so if your career is based around writing business apps or PC related software then you may be in trouble. But with so many things going digital, there will be greater demand for people to make these systems, and they will be complex systems.
Although the job market is trash right now for IT, it is trash for just about everything else, except maybe a bankruptcy lawer.
You log onto a site like dice or monster and you see thousands of jobs. The only problem is these jobs demand skill and knowledge. Real knowledge, not the kind that a certifcate from a 5 month program gives you.
I hope I don't come across as a troll, but seriously, most of these certificates A+, MCSE etc are nothing more than going to a factory and reading a really long manual on how to operate a machine. We need people for this of course, but don't expect to be paid well for it anymore as we have found out that anyone can do this if they are willing to put a few months effort into it.
Go back to school right now and learn something real. If not, at least go to the library and read some hard material, the kind that takes a while to learn. These are the types of people needed desperatly right now. People are having a terrible time sifting through the people who can actually solve problems that are defined with the domain of their limited skill set.
I don't know, just some thoughts, but did you really think it was going to last? Eaasy come, easy go goes the saying. I'm convinced if the unemployed IT "professionals" took time off to learn some things, like how a computer really works, they would see the rewards. Then again, nothing is guarenteed and I need as little competition as possible to keep my wallet fat.
We talk about the need for robust software, well become a robust programmer. Don't paint yourself into a corner by putting it all on X technology. Learn the foo and you can adapt to anything.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
For the love of god, it's only a week or so since we had an identical thread under a similar name. JUST DEAL WITH THE FACT THAT CLAIMING SOME UNDERSTANDING OF 'NET TECHONOLOGY IS NO LONGER A PATH TO INSTANT RICHES. YOU CAN STILL DO OK IF YOU WORK HARD, BUT THE GOLD RUSH IS OVER, GOT THAT?'. OK, now that's out of my system, can the people who don't really enjoy working late to solve logic puzzles please leave the profession, whilst the rest of us pay our mortgages they way we always planned?
The sky is falling etc.
Guess what, we are in a nasty recession. ALL capital spending is way off. Businesses spend money to increase capacity when growth is strong. No growth, capacity underutilization etc. means no need to increase capacity through either productivity or staff improvements. IT accounts for something like 20-30% of capital investments.
When the economy starts growing again people will start being in short supply (unemployment overall is a relatively low 6% given the severity of the recession) soon. The only way businesses will be able to increase capacity is through capital investment. During all this Moore's law has been chugging along and those new systems will be 10x+ faster (and getting 64bit CPUs in commodity hardware allowing manipulation of massive data sets cheaply) than what the business has been using, and software to take advantage has been getting better too, making upgrades very cost-effective. Businesses have also been amassing mammouth quantities of data in electronic form in the meantime because of their previous investments.
Moore's law doesn't tell the whole story by far. Data storage capacity and network bandwith are increasing at rates far faster than Moore's law. CPUs are relatively mature by comparison, ONLY doubling every two years or so. Hard disk bytes/$ doubles every 9 months, and network bandwidth is tripled every year.
The confluence of trends is obvious, and somebody is going to make a lot of money tying all this together.
The IT good times will roll again soon enough. When it happens you won't be able to outsource to China or India because they will be caught up in it too. Companies who outsourced their IT will find that the new crown jewels of productivity will be beyond their grasp and they will relearn the hard lesson that you DO NOT outsource core business activities if you want to maintain control of your fate.
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.
hmm...I've encountered this before, but I haven't really taken a serious look at it until I read this post. Since you seem to be familiar with the proposal, can you answer a few questions for me?
1) The site repeatedly emphasises that you will now take home 100% of your paycheck - no taxes deducted. How does the split between federal and state taxes work? Are all states now required to take thier income solely from sales tax, and is the percentage they get fixed? Either way, is this an infringement on state's rights?
2) How does this affect retirement/pension plans other than social security? Personally, I don't pay into social security, but I do pay into a state retirement plan which is IMO much better; would this plan force me to switch to social security?
3) According to the website, everything would be taxed at 23% (with a refund for "necessities"). Given that, as a college student on a very limited income, I pay almost no taxes, wouldn't I be voting to have less money if I approved this?
4) Wouldn't this increase the rate at which society fractures into the "haves" and "have-nots", as those earning {m/b}illions would have almost none of it taxed unless they choose to spend?
5) Between the increase in sales tax and the decrease in the taxes corporations pay, what would you expect to be the net change in the price of goods?
6) Why should corporations be exempt from taxes and yet still be given rights as persons? And since businesses aren't taxed, wouldn't than encourage everyone to just incorporate as a business and claim everything is for "business use"?
Twenties Retirement
For Australia at least..
In Australia companies have been trying to cut costs in It for about a year and a half now.
You can only do that for so long before you run the risk of having your company fall so far behind that it will never recover (or you have to spend too much to recover).
I believe that companies in Australia will stop out sourcing and start spending large on IT internally very soon.. in the next 6 - 12 months at least.
I reckon we're about to see the second big rise of IT in Australia, right on the heals of broadband and "free to air" wireless networks..
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
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. =)