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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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In our case the "next great surge" would be the handhelds and wireless technologies, which will represent the major IT knowledge investments in the upcoming years... until the bubble pops again.
Time to get back hacking this GBA again.
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
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...
People can only view so much porn..
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.
A-Bomb
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.
You remind me of me back when I was in college. Just mainly wanted to do it because I loved programming. Most of the other people in my class just wanted "easy money." The majority of them did only the minimal amount of programming needed to pass whatever class they were taking at the time. The really sad part is that even thogh you may not be "in-it-for-the-big-bucks" you can bet just about anyone else in the software industry is. In one talk with a former IT manager, he scorned my reasons for being a programmer and was flabergasted that I didn't care about is mult-thousand dollar bonus, he was planning to get upon the projects completion. If you just love to do programming, you really don't need college for it. Looking back on my college days, I feel like I got scammed. Most of what I learned was on my own, between work and classes. The college degree is a costly ticket to IT slavedom, where your day is spent making some jerk at the top rich. My advice to you is work a good-paying day-job and program in your sparetime doing open-source or something that helps your day-job. The ideal setup would be to own your own business and do your own web development and information management.
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.
..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