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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 But in most cases, there's no need to rush: "No tool is really outdated if it serves the needs of end users," says Eric Goldfarb, CIO at PRG-Schultz International Inc. in Atlanta.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,
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.
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.
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.