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Top 5 Submerging Technologies Pinpointed
An anonymous reader writes "Computerworld makes its picks of five 'submerging' (i.e. dying) technologies, as the article asks 'Where are the review committees for obsolete technologies?' The picks, made by 'corporate IT managers and analysts', include Windows 9x, client/server computing and Visual Basic 6."
I'd like to submerge 'corporate IT managers and analysts'.
.. I think they need to include the computerworld.com webserver on the list..
Submerging Technologies: Five That Are Sinking Fast
These technologies are rapidly taking on water. Is it time to jump ship?
Story by Gary H. Anthes and Robert L. Mitchell
OCTOBER 20, 2003 ( COMPUTERWORLD ) - Most corporate IT organizations have steering committees to craft strategies for new technologies, chief technology officers to assess new products, and IT policies and procedures for developing and buying new hardware and software.
But where are the review committees for obsolete technologies? Who's looking at what's in the data center, on desktops and in briefcases to see if they still make sense? Who's checking to see if spare parts, vendor support and employees with the right skills will be available next month--or next year?
In most companies, no one is doing those things in any rigorous way, says John Parkinson, chief technologist for the Americas region at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young in Chicago. "I know of very few companies that actively manage sunsetting their IT," he says. "They think it will last forever."
It doesn't, of course. But in most cases, there's no need to rush: "No tool is really outdated if it serves the needs of end users," says Eric Goldfarb, CIO at PRG-Schultz International Inc. in Atlanta. However, IT managers who wait too long may risk being forced into expensive last-minute changes to accommodate new technology initiatives as business needs change. That IP telephony call center application won't fly if you have to replace not only the private branch exchange but also update network cabling and those nonswitched, shared-media Ethernet hubs.
Parkinson says that for each type of software and hardware installed, companies should have an estimated cost and date to replace it and an estimated cost to retain it. "You really should have this in the plan when you [buy], otherwise you won't know what ROI to expect," he says.
Of course, some technologies need closer scrutiny than others. So Computerworld asked corporate IT managers and analysts what items they would put at the top of their lists. Some of them may justify an immediate rip-and-replace strategy; others should be put on your "endangered" list. Here are five submerging technologies to watch in 2004:
1. WINDOWS 9x
Why it's sinking: Can 92 million users be wrong? Yes. Declining support, reliability problems, security issues and incompatibility with new applications should drive the remaining installed base to Windows 2000 or XP.
Credit: Red Nose Studio
No obsolete technology is in wider use than the 9x versions of Microsoft Corp.'s operating system. "Windows 9x is getting to be pretty much unsustainable," says Tony Iams, an analyst at D.H. Brown Associates Inc. in Port Chester, N.Y. Indeed, many companies have already migrated to Windows 2000 Professional to gain the reliability of an operating system built on the more stable NT kernel.
But eradicating Windows 9x won't come easy: IDC in Framingham, Mass., estimates that by year's end, there will still be 17 million Windows 95 installations, 48 million Windows 98 users and 27 million machines still running Windows Me. And the majority of those are business PCs, claims IDC analyst Dan Kuznetsky. "In the long term, it will probably be less costly to upgrade [to Windows XP], just because the NT kernel is much more reliable," he says.
But what if your organization has waited? Should you go directly to XP, wait for the next generation (code-named Longhorn) or choose something else?
Don't hold your breath for Longhorn: It isn't due to arrive until 2005 at the earliest. Linux is a widely touted option, but for many the idea of replacing thousands of Windows installations, training users on a new operating system and getting it to work with existing Windows applications is a nonstarter.
Tom Pratt, information systems manager at Coastal Transportation Inc. in Seattle, says he has no plans to abandon Windows 98. The applications running on his boats won't run on anything else,
MusicMatch
Client/Server architecture?
Yeah...whatever.
Because the internet (www especially) would work FINE if it was all p2p.
Well, the title of the article was supposed to be "5 Technologies That Our Advertisers Want You To Replace With Their Latest & Greatest, Very Expensive and Awe-Inspiring Technology." But that took up too much space...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Although magnetic tape's cost per megabyte will give it a role in keeping archival records for years to come, better technologies and techniques are eroding tape's dominance for day-to-day backup and recovery tasks.
Heh. Let me tell you why tapes are good. Tapes are very, very simple and well understood. You can repair a broken tape with a Stanley knife and Sellotape if you have to. Sure you might lose a few blocks, but with decent archiving tools (like cpio and bzip2) losing a file won't cost you the entire archive. If a tape drive fails, just replace it, easy.
Now, when a hard drive fails, what're you going to do? Repair the platter? Transplant it to another hard drive? Just not feasible. And how're you going to store archives? Tapes are cheap and high density. Maybe you've moved buildings a couple of times and they've been kicked around, how certain are you HDs can be plugged back in and run? And they take more physical space too, and still cost more.
Tapes aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
This is the chart that concluded the article...
Legend---
Out - O:
In - I:
Why - Y:
----
O: 900-MHz wireless LANs
I: 802.11 WLANs
Y:Early WLANs installed in warehouses and manufacturing floors won't work with 802.11b. Integration requires an upgrade.
O:1U (1.75-in. high) servers
I:Blade servers
Y:They save space, eliminate cables and lower costs by sharing power supplies and connectivity.
O:Color ink-jet printers
I:Color laser printers
Y:Color laser printers used to cost thousands; now they're well under $1,000. And color laser cartridge changes are less frequent--and less messy.
O:CRT monitors
I:LCD monitors
Y:Flicker-free LCDs reduce eyestrain; the tubeless design saves on desk space, and the LCDs are less environmentally hazardous at disposal time than CRTs.
O:Dot-matrix printers
I:Ink-jet/laser printers
Y:Dot-matrix printers are still good for multipart forms, but as volumes have fallen, prices have jumped above those of both ink-jet and low-end laser printers.
O:Ethernet hubs
I:Intelligent switches
Y:Newer switches are inexpensive, a prerequisite for IP telephony, and typically support Simple Network Management Protocol for remote manageability.
O:File servers
I:Network-attached storage appliances
Y:Why maintain file servers for shared storage when you can plug in a simple appliance?
O:Floppy disks
I:Flash disks, writable CDs, DVDs
Y:What fits on 1.44MB of disk space anymore?
O:Mac OS 9
I:Mac OS X
Y:Increased stability makes this upgrade a no-brainer.
O:Modems
I:Wireless LANs
Y:With WLANs expanding across offices, public spaces and hotels, the modem, with its 56Kbit/sec. speed limit, is fast becoming the computing equivalent of an automobile's limited-service spare tire--used only in emergencies, at low speeds.
O:PBXs
I:IP telephony/call manager servers
Y:With applications that require an integrated voice/data network already emerging, another long-term investment in a digital PBX at this point probably doesn't make sense.
O:PDAs
I:Cell phone/PDA hybrids
Y:Free up your pockets! New hybrid models are finally reaching a size and price where a single, integrated device makes sense.
O:Serial/parallel ports
I:USB 2.0 ports
Y:The ports won't go away on PCs anytime soon, but for new hardware, Universal Serial Bus peripherals are faster and often easier to set up.
O:Token Ring
I:Ethernet
Y:Ethernet: Cheap and ubiquitous. Token Ring: Expensive, with limited vendor sources. Any questions?
O:Windows NT servers
I:Windows 2000, Server 2003
Y:Support will disappear soon--as will all those security patches and updates.
O:Zip drives
I:Rewritable CD/DVD drives
Y:CD-ROM drives are inexpensive and ubiquitous, and the media are cheaper.
According to the chart at the end of the article, Zip drives are a dying technology. I've got news for those guys: Zip drives died, rigor mortis set in, the were embalmed, buried, and have mostly decomposed.
I've got a few of them at home, including two internal IDE Zip drives, an external USB Zip drive, and an external SCSI Zip drive. I also have about 50 Zip disks but I can't even remember the last time I spun one of them up.
Iomega pissed away that entire market with their greed. Had they been smarter, they would have given the drives away in every Dell, Compaq, and Gateway system sold and made money off of the media (ala the Gillette shaver business model). Instead, they continued to charge too much for the drives, limiting their adoption. As CD-R and CD-RW media plummeted in price, Iomega continued to charge an arm and a leg for their Zip media rather than dropping prices to retain customers. They introduced the Zip 250, Zip Click!, and Zip 750, all of which failed due to the high drive costs, exorbitant media costs, and marketplace confusion with customers not knowing which model to buy in order to exchange data with colleagues and friends. They never effectively tried to broaden the appeal of their media with MP3 recorders, players, or in-dash car units.
After effectively killing the Zip product line, they introduced external CD-R/W drives. Unfortunately, they were just rebadged units stuck in gaudy blue cases -- for which they charged double what everyone else did. They're toast.
Yeah. I also don't know whether to be disturbed or amused that "Windows 9x" and "VB6" -- i.e., specific, not very good instances of particular products from a particular company -- are classed as "technologies" along with as vast a category as "client-server computing." It's kind of like saying "Fuel injection and the 1998 Ford Taurus are both major automotive technologies." No, one's a technology; the other is a brand name. And when we can't tell branding apart from innovation, we've got a problem.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Because $ per MB, tape is way ahead still, is significantly smaller, and hold up to transportation and movement better.
As far as shelf-life goes, that's a good question. will a tape sitting on a shelf fare better than a hard drive after 10 years? I don' t know.
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
Er, maybe 15 years ago (and probably not even then), but now days most of those six year olds could probably frag the daylights out of their teacher. For any kid raised on a steady diet of console game controllers bristling with buttons, a two button one wheel mouse probably seems quaint. Face it, the one button mouse is probably more for the benefit of the computer-phobic person teaching the class.
... or "submerging", whatever that's supposed to mean.
.NET and Java. HTTP and HTML are wonderful, but they are not the solution to every problem. In some cases, people need GUI behavior that is just too difficult to get through a browser. For example, just try editing a grid of data in a browser. The web is not made for that sort of activity.
I work for a company that builds business software. We have big projects building N-tier apps with "rich clients" on both
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
- Win9x: For most of our hardware, nothing else makes sense. Our budget (small biz -- 20 employees) doesn't let us upgrade that often. Personally, I run Windows only when I absolutely have to, and I certainly am NOT going to run it on the latest hardware. Hence, Win9x.
- Client/Server: You know what? It's not dead, especially for smaller installs. Sure, IBM and other greats can't justify having an app that has to be installed on every darn workstation or has to have heavier clients (I dislike 'fat', it implies bloat.) We don't cater to 300 workstations, we cater to 4 or 5. C/S is still the way for us and will be for ages.
- Tape Backup: Because you'll never convince the PHB that hard drives are just as reliable. Mind you, when the boss buys Maxtor POS drives, what do you expect?
- 1U (1.75-in. high) servers: What in hades do I need a blade for? We add services once, maybe twice a year. We have all of 10 things in the rack...maybe. 1Us are still important for us.
- Color inkjet printers: How often do I print code in color? Reports in color? ANYTHING in color? Rare enough to not justify the laserjet price, that's how not often.
- Ethernet hubs: Intelligent blah, blah, blah VOIP blah, blah, blah. Anyone else tired of this? When my fly gets voice command, folks. That's when I'll care.
- PBXs: Just bought one a few years ago. Have no interest in spending money on something that isn't broken and won't be for years.
- PDAs: This is a case of Last Mile Land out here. I don't even HAVE a cell phone because I can't get a signal -- no towers near enough. A PDA would be nice, but Xmas presents just don't come that large usually.
- Serial/parallel ports: Nothing quite as reliable or easily configured as talking to a simple, straightforward port that doesn't give you any guff.
The rest of the predictions are expected and agreed upon. These are just ones I don't see migrating from anytime soon, and I'm sure lots of other people could make similar lists. Does that mean we're against progress? Hell no. It just means that we'd prefer if those vendors kept their "Convert Now!" pressure down until we damned well are ready to convert and not before. Some pressure is good...keeps us all looking at the new possibilities. But I don't need some jackass breathing down my neck about technologies (VOIP) that will make no sense in our corporation for ages to come yet. I also don't need vendors dropping support for "legacy" systems just because they came out with WhizBang Product 2.0.Blog,Twitter