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Technology Paradise Lost
The dust cover blurb summarizes Keller's position: "...American corporations let IT grow until it reached one half of all corporate capital spending by the year 2000. Now, chastened by their spending failures, IT managers are converging on a new consensus: to exploit IT competitively they must use their smarts over big money. ... Counterintuitively, companies that spend less in order to get more from information technology will likely be the big winners." That's quite a claim, and a thorough reading of the book finds that Keller only supports half of that thesis.
The thought is reiterated early in the book: "...companies can move ahead over the next few years without large increases in their IT budgets. The only thing a company needs is a different perspective." (page xii). That prescription sounds suspiciously similar to the oversimplistic advice found in positive thinking self-help books. Keller does not yet make explicit what the different perspective will do for business. Perhaps it should be taken at face value, in that it will allow companies to move ahead without increasing their IT budgets. But is continued progress without budget increases such a massive gain? More significantly, how does that address the larger issues of failed IT projects, to which he alludes earlier? In my opinion, that issue is of much greater consequence.
Keller correctly points to some of the reasons why the heady e-commerce binges are not about to return: increasing scrutiny of IT budgets, greater demand for return on investment (ROI), cheaper and simpler solutions, offshoring of software development, lower wages to American programmers, abandonment of failing projects, Internet-based architecture, and adoption of open source software (OSS), such as Linux. Addressing these changes at a more strategic level, Keller notes that, "After years of questionable returns, cost overruns, and increased complexity, companies are pushing financial rigor to IT groups." (page 6).
The book's first seven chapters discuss the primary factors in leading to reduced IT expenditures, at least within the U.S. business community. But the last four chapters go over previous ground, with more variations on the theme of reduced IT spending, interspersed with several examples from various corporations. The reader may get the sense that not much new information or recommendations are being offered, but instead that these four chapters are serving as filler, to beef up the size of the book. Otherwise, it would be more obvious that the book's usable contents could be boiled down into one meaty article.
Keller's primary thesis, that American IT could in the future produce more returns for less investment, has two primary components. The near-term and likely long-term trend for declining corporate spending on IT, is well established in his book. In fact, one could argue that reduced IT spending is not something that American companies will adopt by choice, but instead will be forced upon them due to deflationary pressures, increased costs for natural resources, and declining ability to pass along cost increases to U.S. consumers falling further behind financially. But the flip side of his thesis, that companies will get even more results despite spending less money, is not nearly as well substantiated. Not a single one of the chapters in the book is devoted to demonstrating that this is happening, or will happen. Companies may be able to maintain current levels of service despite reduced funding; but greater results per dollar invested (i.e., efficiency) does not imply greater results on an absolute basis. As such, Keller's big claim noted earlier, is only half fulfilled.
The critical questions -- concerning the proper role and funding of IT -- are presented in the book couched in the language used by high-level business managers, who speak in vague terms about "technology" and "infrastructure," and yet have little or no real understanding of how it truly works, having spent their earlier years pursuing MBAs rather than programming computers. It could be argued that such general terminology must necessarily be used when discussing information technology among business managers. That may be true, but it does not lessen the dangers of fuzzy thinking and overly broad conclusions found in Keller's book and in the typical articles discussing IT purpose, strategy, and utilization. In particular, such excessively broad strokes, in my experience, not only mask the ignorance of the IT manager demanding miracles from their staff, but invariably increases the odds that upper management will be seduced by the handwaving consulting firms -- and thus fall prey to the mistakes delineated by Keller.
Of all the inapt analogies in the book, its title is perhaps the most egregious. Alluding to John Milton's famous narrative poem, "technology paradise lost" implies that there was a time when IT resource usage was idyllic, if not perfect. Yet by Keller's own account, the misspending and failed projects, followed by financial discipline imposed by the outside world, are anything but heaven-sent. One cannot lose what has never been found.
Weighing in at 243 pages, Technology Paradise Lost is a quicker read than many other business books. Part of that is due to the unfortunate repetition of a few core ideas. Fortunately, the book has just enough tables, charts, and breakouts, to add some visual variety to the text.
The book benefits from the author's clear writing style, no doubt honed from over two decades of creating articles, documents, and presentations intended for business managers. Keller does a solid job of utilizing real world statistics and examples to back up his assessments.
Despite the repetition, sloppy analogies, and business-speak generality, Technology Paradise Lost offers a valid discussion of changes currently being experienced by the American IT industry as it grudgingly recovers from the Internet boom and bust. The book may be of value to IT managers who, for whatever reason, are ignorant of the obvious transformations that are taking place. Yet, any IT industry participant who devotes even a modicum of time to monitoring the latest developments and trends, should be well aware of IT budget trimming, offshoring, open source software, and other cost-saving methods. Otherwise, to be so out of touch with reality would be inexcusable. On the other hand, that was one of the primary symptoms before and during the widespread dot-com insanity, and could easily account for any beliefs in its imminent return.
Michael J. Ross is a freelance writer, computer consultant, and the editor of PristinePlanet.com's free newsletter." You can purchase Technology Paradise Lost from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Technology Paradise FOUND
So make this book available to reduce the competition then? I suppose that is valid. I would still like to know about programming for the mathematic and linguistic aspects. As we progress to transhumanism, our thought process may become more Java and less Jaya (dialect in Chad).
Transcend Humanity. Please.
I remember those days - sure it was a time of great promise and flowing capital but the products royally sucked - most didn't live up to the hype and the futurama aura and many a flawed device pissed off customers with the poor service after the sale. Lately, I've been buying a lot of stuff and have had a great success rate, I've been real happy with stuff recently.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
...we'll see the return of really good Superbowl commercials!
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
when they used to do the predictions with an envelope in their hand turban on their heads... Oh, wait..
Faith: n. -- That human impulse that drives them to steal appliances when the power goes out
True Technologic Paradise FOUND?
Maybe now that all the fantastic and unrealistic business views of IT are gone, we can concentrate on science and actually learning something?
If it's not in verse it sucks.
"Do more with less! I wrote a book about it, so I know how! Just make sure your reduced budget has room to hire brilliant consultants like me!"
...IT departments have a rather apathetic and wasteful attitude about software and hardware. It's nice to hear that the successful companies will be required to be resourceful and wise in IT to be successful(if the author of the book is right, of course).
For a while there, I suspected that incompetent and wasteful IT was a necessary evil of working at medium- to large-sized organizations. Reading this review gives me new hope.
I pity the foo that isn't metasyntactic
"...Counterintuitively, companies that spend less in order to get more from information technology will likely be the big winners."
I predict MS won't exist in 5 years!
As a transhuman cyberthalamus, you'd be covered in something much stronger than lead. Guns won't be feared.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
Book Reviews: Automobile Paradise Lost
Posted by timothy on 01:12 PM -- Thursday May 19 1935
from the see-ya-suckers dept.
Michael J. Ross writes "For veterans of the automobile (CAR) industry, the late 1920s was a remarkable time. The "stock-market bubble" expanded, the model-Ts rolled off the assembly line, and the automaker stocks soared. But now that the bubble has deflated and the automobile party has wound down, U.S. vehicle assembly lines are struggling with reduced budgets. Yet apparently many believe that the sector will regain its past glory and blistering growth rates. According to experienced automobile consultant Erik Keller, it's not going to happen. He presents his case in Automobile Paradise Lost, published by Manning Publications, whose user group representative kindly provided me with a copy of the book for review." Read on for the rest of Ross's review.
"Yet apparently many believe that the sector will regain its past glory and blistering growth rates." I must say that I can't recall anyone ever intimating that such a thing would happen.
Probably the most obvious way this is reflected in code production is the attention paid to lines of code as a metric of productivity without constraints on how poorly factored the code is.
Good factoring is simply another way of saying "good theorizing". Ockham's Razor works for a lot of reasons and is the basis for the best measure of code quality: algorithmic information which is computer science's Ockham's Razor.
As warned of by Tacitus:
The same goes for scientific theory, business rules and software quality.
Too many cheap programmers spells death -- not life -- for IT.
Seastead this.
I have not heard of this person.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
Huh? It strikes me as, if anything, utterly obvious.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
One problem with the boom days is that people were building out infrastructure without a lot of information as to (1) how much infrastructure was enough, and (2) without a real business driver.
This is probably due to the lack of experience in most corporations at the time. If you listened to vendors, you needed multiple redundant 64-way Sun boxes to keep your website up and running. Oh, and you'll need a couple of T-1s to feed all that, firewalls, multiple DMZs, and the management software for it.
These days people know that's BS. Why do we need GigE to the desktop? We don't. That's stupid. Why do we need more horsepower? We don't. It's not cost effective. Does this piece of software or hardware actually help our business make money? No? Don't buy it then.
Really, IT supports business. It's an enabling technology, but back in the day nobody really knew enough to figure out what parts really were worth it and what parts weren't. The vendors, obviously, oversold everything. The press were just as ignorant as the customers.
Even today, finding scalability/load/capacity information for most equipment is difficult to impossible. Luckily, now there's a body of knowledge (lore) that you can draw on. Before, there was nothing except vendor propaganda.
He is a really bright and funny guy, although he had a real nasty habit of picking his nose and eating the booger at meetings. Really grossed people out, but still quite an intelligent guy!
He's really forgetting the obvious:
10 years ago we were just starting to grapple with the new technologies that the Internet brought about. Applications over TCP/IP, the Web, all sorts of routers, switches and new appliances: all of that necessitated a long and steep learning curve.
Today we have 10 years of experience in all of this "stuff", which makes us enormously more knowledgeable and productive. From all perspectives, hardware vendors are now able to service customers with much more targeted, effective and cheaper offerings (notice the move from software to hardware appliances and custom chips), and IT staffs now know how to use all of these toys properly, what works and what doesn't.
It's all mostly a matter of experience. That's why IT budgets will remain flat for a while longer.
The critical questions -- concerning the proper role and funding of IT -- are presented in the book couched in the language used by high-level business managers, who speak in vague terms about "technology" and "infrastructure," and yet have little or no real understanding of how it truly works, having spent their earlier years pursuing MBAs rather than programming computers
The people you describe above are the people who control the purse strings. They couldn't care less about the underlying bits and pieces. How much is it going to cost and what's the benefit to the business?
Having "great IT" isn't worth a warm bucket of spit as a key differentiator these days.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
(IGHEATA) ((I'm Glad He Explained All Those Abbreviations))
"When they invent bitch slaps that can go through a monitor you better f'ing duck" --deft (253558)
Sorry, but can someone help me?
... will likely be the big winners."
I'm only a web developer, so I'm not the sharpest tool in the box.
I never realised that;
"companies that spend less in order to get more
This has to be some business related thing that us in the web industry never realised. Can someone enlighten me? Perhaps their are a few BS grades reading this post?
in the long run, we're all dead anyway.
Hardware is getting cheaper and will continue to do so. I built a computer for $1500 in 2000. Today, it's probably worth $100 (maybe not that much) today. A 1 GB Ram module for it retails for around $120. Even if I bought and installed the Ram module, I *still* probably couldn't sell the computer for more than $100.
I see people advertising 'Almost New' HP and Dell laptops on ebay. They sell for a fraction of the original price. Service and support are what costs *real* money these days. Three year service contracts start out at $350. When you have to buy a $350 service contract on a $600 PC, you know where the *true* costs are for the manufacturer.
That 1 GB memory module probably only cost about 20 bucks or so to make. That's why it'd be foolosh to buy it new and pay $120 for it.
Who was Eve and what was the Apple that complete the analogy?
American corporations let IT grow until it reached one half of all corporate capital spending by the year 2000
Remember, that small thing called Y2K? Yeah, companies spent a lot of money, but much of it was directed at fixing Y2K issues and ensuring that all systems were compliant. At least in my company. Maybe smaller companies were fiscally irresponsible, but I think most large corporations have so much bureaucracy that increasing spending for any reason is difficult.
In my IT department, we heard many people leaving and joining startups, buying aeron chairs and having foosball tables in their offices, but those of us who stuck around didn't see any increases in spending.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
be sure your thoughts are compilable by the current version of GCJ or another free software java VM.
I've looked at this from both sides, but I'll borrow from a recent economics column http://www.techcentralstation.com/051905B.html:
We need people who can address technical and business audiences with equal skill. I'm not saying it's easy -- I'm leaving my current company because I just didn't have it -- but it's going to be more critical because the biggest benefits will come from taking a new technical innovation and using it to solve a business problem.
No one seems to care that the traitorous, neoliberal politicians sold our geek jobs out to H1Bs and to outsourced 3rd world labor. I say indict, try, and convict for treason (in a court of law) all the politicians who sold us out, along with the CEOs who did the same, and then sentence them to death and execute them in the electric chair, as all traitors should be executed, by rule of law, and then we can get America back on track.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
...in just under 8000 years when the Y10K crisis hits.
Want to improve your life? This guy will show you how!
"That prescription sounds suspiciously similar to the oversimplistic advice found in positive thinking self-help books."
I got into I.T. back in 1990 and have been able to see a sickening trend overtake the entire industry. It's the lawyers stupid. Theft of the freedom to control your own I.T. destiny is the underlying reason why the IT field is becoming an ever-increasing hell to work within. I.T. managers used to enjoy the power to "steer their ship" in directions which made the most productive use of technology in business, after all that's what they were trained and experienced in doing. Slowly, they were robbed of that, and more and more were forced, and "ordered" to run things the way that outside influences corralled them into... primary by legal interests, not business interests.
By selling out so easily to business, technology has been held back in many ways. It was a matter of offering the brains and the creative geeks some money, so they would use their knowledge for evil, rather than good. I think I prefer the 80s, where at least there was still some idealism.
What did the 90s boom give us? Fucking internet advertising and banner ads. Overpaid HTML jockeys with no skill. Trolls, script-kiddies and fools. Pyramid schemes. "Bloggers." And we can never go back to those blissful ad-free, blog-free days.
... and then they built the supercollider.
I'm not sure why he says that the glorious e-commerce days wont return. Hey - there where no glorious days. Surely, a lot of sites spawned all over the net, hoping to grasp some of those millions just waiting to be earned, but there weren't much actual buying taking place on the net. The e-commerce market is much bigger today than it was then. The ammount of credit card transactions on the net peaked christmas 2004.
Basically!
,i'm sure the company would have paid for better computers and faster server to meet the demands.
He's suggesting to apply the knowlegde of patching what you have and exploiting it at the maximum of it's limit, i'm o.k with that but there is also a downside to a company wanting more from it's failing equipment and at some point it needs to invest in it for the long term and not try to patch it up to the cheapest technology just to save a couple of buck!
I know , my company was doing this till it got bought buy a bigger one!
And it didnt want to invest so pc were put to replace servers etc..etc.. 2 years ago we still had win95 installed and i found a windows 3.11,
ser had pentium 133 and they were doing Office access and using huge database....took the average computer half an hour to 45 minutes to generate one report,and while waiting for it, they were doing almost nothing.If i could calcualte all the wasted hours of those users
So if a company wants to save money, it better think about all the downside of not upgrading to better system rather than stick with shit that makes the user do less work!
Dont get me wrong, a good evaluation of the needs of a company is in order here, but doing the total opposite of what was done in the 90's is no way to go! a just middle is the answer!
In my experience, the only "successful" IT departments I've seen these days are the ones who obey, like good little slaves, the lawyers who actually run the show.
IT spending by established corporations did not blow the dotcom bubble. It was inflated by the public fascination with this new internet crap, VC's who covered their asses and made out like bandits on the IPO, the usual ranks of empty suits who latch on to a preposterous idea if it's gonna get them a raise, and the idiotic MBA's at the various equipment vendors who were no wise enough to get payment in full for every bit of hardware sold.
If you recall, companies that 'invested' by extending rediculous amnounts of credit to flakey startups without a hope of seeing black are now down the rathole. i.e. Nortel and Lucent. Not to mention the leasing companies and their underwriters who took quite the beating but kept the likes of Sun above water.
The big winners in the dotcom era were the investment bankers and those companies who knew it was too good to be true but milked it for all it was worth.
It was a market driven technogeek paradise. It was all bells, whistles, "lickability," flash this, buzzword that, complete and utter vapor could turn industries, and even the stock market, on its head overnight. Fast women chased the nerds with pockets full of even faster money and high paying jobs flowed like water, even for kids who weren't even out of high school yet and the first order of the day when you got to "work" was often a Nerf(tm) fight or fragfest.
.wow!" Although it usually requires a bit of capital it isn't about the bloody corporate budget. It belongs to the technologists, not the IT infrastructure.
The insane frequently mistake their insanity for paradise.
No, that sort of shit ain't likely to come back in our lifetimes.
Technology marches on, and paradise can be found anywhere you find someone with a terminal, soldering iron or lath exclaming to hisself at three in the morning, "Oh. .
Sorry about your job, kid, but really, I *did* try to warn you back in the day.
KFG
people do
That is why until organizations learn to ignore their big huge engineering-based waterfall processes and start focusing on developing their people both individually and as teams, they will not see any significant improvements in their ability to use IT more effectively. Agile methods are really great because they turn the focus away from the process (use the minimum process that can possibly work), to the people (teamwork, communication, collaboration, mentoring, etc.). That isn't to say that agile methods are easy... far from it. In many cases it takes a huge cultural shift for an organization to adopt agile methods. However, the effort is worth it because suddenly projects that used to take 18 calendar months are being finished in 4 or 6 calendar months... simply by eliminating the worst wastes in the corporate system, amplifying the team's learning, and allowing them to make decisions about how they do their work.
Check out:The Agile Software Manifesto
The Scrum Methodology
And my blog, Agile Advice (couldn't help but put in a little self promotion
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
Stop your whining. The bulk of programming is grunt work these days. A commodity. In 5 years it will be almost all automated anyways and then the Indians and the Chinese will be bitching. Geeks are expendable.
This doesn't excuse companies who take advantage of lucrative tax breaks here in the US only to offshore and outsource, but that's a separate issue that has nothing to do with you precious geeks with an overinflated sense of your worth.
Ellen Feiss. Didn't things go downhill after she seductively hypnotized geeks around the world?
... and then they built the supercollider.
IOW, if they simply spend less on IT, they will get more and be the big winners. A simple formula, like downsizing
I, for one, hope this doesn't become YA suit stampede.
I think it'dd be back to its former glory in size, etc, but as for speed of growth, i highly doubt it. I think The problem is that last time people got all excted about this new fun stuff, and then didnt know how to handle it. I think it will definalty be as big and bigger than it was, but it will be a slower and more controlled expansion that will be more like a gum bubble slowly expanding instead of a gum bubble forced full of air faster than it can expand. I feel that a lot of people have learned now how to do things properly. there's my $0.02.
Uhhh, sorry, but IT is now the very definition of commodity. Hardware, labor, and software are now so cheap and interchangeable that there's no other way to describe it. Rather than spend money on expensive RISC chips like pa-risc or Ultrasparc, you can now get cheap x86/64 chips with comparable or better performance for a fraction of the price, and from a wide variety of vendors. With the information revolution and the Internet, now you can get programmers from across the ocean for a 10th of what you'd pay an expierienced US coder. And software? Windows boxes are relatively inexpensive compared to what businesses used to pay for unix workstations, and now you've got cheap/no cost software on top of that.
Face it...IT has become the Wal Mart of business buying. It's cheap, it's everywhere, and for IT vendors to make money, they have to rely on huge volume because margins are so slim. Only companies like IBM are making real money from services, and some people think even that won't last forever. I read a stat that claimed IBM was losing $33 on every PC they made, which is why they sold that business.
Spending less while getting more isn't a new concept, as the author might think. Other business sectors have lived by the mantra for years. IT has just been forced to play that game too after the disastrous dot bomb. Welcome to the real world, IT, the world where life is hard and business is cutthroat. The dot com boom was a fantasyland that was doomed to failure, and it's never coming back.
Knowing this, isn't it getting a bit tiring to hear these execs say that not enough students are going into IT/CS? Surprise surprise...the grads we have now have to scrape for jobs compared to other highly skilled professions, and the current marketplace is hot for international outsourcing. Why are these people surprised that US students are going "no thanks"?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
You are exactly right. This is what I thought all along. Y2K was a great excuse for IT departments to spend lots of money to upgrade equipment to make it Y2K compliant. I know I saw a lot of purchases made that weren't really necessary for Y2K but were slid under the table as part of the Y2K expenditures.
.com firms, was "nothing", and they are no longer here.
I think Y2K, combined with ignorant investors who thought "computers" would be the "plastics" of the '60s, really artificially pumped up the industry. After Y2K came and went, so did the massive expenditures. The party ended, and people wanted to know what REAL product was being produced for all the money. The answer, for a lot of
Steve
The tech bubble(s) of the 90s wasn't caused by IT departments. It was caused by venture capitalist, who had major investments in tech companies, bullshitting every other company CxO in the world into thinking they too had to have an "Internet Strategy" or that they had to buy into the latest and greatest thingamabob or they would go the way of the dinosaurs. Then after they got other suckers to buy into their IPO's they bailed and brought the tech industry back to earth. Now they are telling CxOs they must have an "Offshoring Strategy" or their company will go the way of the dinosaurs. Wanna guess where the VCs have their money invested these days...
Outsourcing and foreign workers are just the new excuse that's in fashion.
... and then they built the supercollider.
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/9d46eeb0-c34c-11d9-abf1-0 0000e2511c8.html
Downgrades ripple through industry
So we can expect another upswing then another downturn: I hope your timing is better than mine!
Remember how crappy it used to be? Catalog pages didn't match the shopping cart, credit card processing involved ICVerify emulating a 1200 baud card swipe terminal, and half the time you had to call up to find out where your order went. On the merchant side, banks didn't have good online integration, half the transactions were bogus, and there was no way to get UPS and FedEx directly connected to your own systems. There were days when the Internet backbones would choke, and you'd go online to read the Internet weather report and see that MAE-WEST was dropping more than half its packets. And you needed an army of semi-competent people to glue it all together.
The on-line businesses that are still around have all this stuff working smoothly now. (Many of the ones that couldn't make it work are listed here.)
For most businesses, once you have all the basics working, you've achieved most of the benefits IT can provide. There's endless stuff you can waste money on. There's "data mining" and "profiling" and "customer relationship management" and "personalization", but it turns out that what works is telling existing customers of products related to stuff they already bought. Which isn't hard. Microsoft is pushing "synchronization", or "change the spreadsheet and your PowerPoint presentation changes to match", but most those bells and whistles don't really help productivity.
If you're a user of IT, this is great. If you're an "IT guru", this can be bad news.
Once I built a railroad, made it run,
made it race against time.
Once I built a railroad, now it's done.
Brother, can you spare a dime?
I enjoyed working in the software buisiness in the 90s. 80 hour weeks and I enjoyed what I was doing. These days, its all about how low can you go.
If there is one thing I learned its this:
If you enjoy what you are doing and where you live, then someone is going to sell it. Thus, don't hype what you enjoy doing.
Who makes all the internet hardware that is required for all those millions of outsourceable programmers to be able to do their low cost work? Cisco and others are making a killing right now!! ...it smells like paradise to me.
Unionize.
The power of the IT community rivals the trucking industry. If we had a union, we would have a stronger voice in the government.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I note that the reviewer doesn't like the title either. There are several things that all get tied up in "the bubble" that were really separate otherwise.
I think many people, even those of us who lived through it, discount the impact of Y2K on the marketplace. IT spending increased quickly in the late 90s as companies realized they had to address Y2K issues or (potentially) perish. As a result, much work was done that had previously been put off, sometimes for decades. There were massive migrations, massive upgrades, and massive change -- much of it long overdue. This created a bubble in hiring and purchasing, and that bubble largely burst about 15 seconds after midnight local time when Y2K happened and little else.
The internet bubble started earlier, and burst a little later. While Y2K was a 2-3 year bubble on a fast track, the internet bubble was a 5 year bubble that started slow but kept accellerating.
It's also hard to discount the impact of politics in the US on the economy. There are those who say that the bursting of the internet bubble has as much to do with tech stocks being overvalued as it did with George W. Bush practicing economic fear-mongering on the campaign trail -- in essence, talking the economy down. One thing appears clear: when Clinton took office, he had promised tax cuts, but upon meeting with Alan Greenspan, Clinton blinked; when W. took office, and met with Greenspan, Greenspan blinked.
Setting aside the market collapse, both bubbles did a lot to set the stage for long-term success. Y2K forced companies to make investments that will (mostly) stand them in good stead, and forced them to modernize their systems. The internet bubble pushed things past critical mass and got (almost) everyone on the bandwagon. Between 1995 and 2001, American industry probably advanced (or caught up) 20-30 years.
The market collapse may have been a long-term good thing as well, at least in the sense that everything got modernized, bunches of new tech got proven, then we collectively slammed on the brakes and spent the next 3-4 years retrenching. In that time, Apple and IBM have become market leaders in new areas, and a recession is a wonderful thing if you want to force people to consider free software.
I'm not saying all the pain was good. Many people did, indeed, lose paradise. But to me, it looks less and less like a train wreck in hindsight.
http://drteknikal.blogspot.com/
so what if you think that IT budgets are being crunched and there are a hundred reasons (offshoring, requirements of higher ROI, lack of venture funding, etc) that the "dot-com bubble" can't regain it's once-brilliant strength. Why don't you look at consumer trends online instead! Most retail companies are seeing double-digit (nearly 100% in many cases) year-over-year sales growth in online sales. People are comfortable buying online. The high saturation of broadband mixed with a growing number of users who feel that buying online is convenient, hassle free and sometimes perceived as cheaper. THAT is why eCommerce will continue to thrive and only get better. How can you look at a technical or financial limitations instead of consumerism to define the health of a market? This article seems to be comming from the entirely wrong perspective. -b (eCommerce software developer from even before the bubble)
I went to your website and read some of your stuff. You state that Europeans have higher standards of living than Americans. While I would debate that, how do you excuse the higher unemployment rates they have in comparison to us? Also how do you fight the brain drain that Europe suffers from its smartest and most successful leaving Europe to go to lower tax regions? What solution would you have for the lack of European motivation to achieve great things due to so much being provided for one by the state?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
When the internet revolution hit it drove as much value as the investment was in it. Try running any office type business now without the help of the internet... Email and google = Huge business value.
Likewise the internet caused a total transformation of the banking, credit card, stock trading, and travel businesses. I shudder to think how to book a flight before aa.com or how I managed to keep checks from bouncing before my bank got online. I'll tell ya how I did it, I picked up the phone and wasted a half hour or more of my time and the company's time pressing "1" for english and "6" for balance information then keying in my account number and waiting in a call queue for an hour.
So many businesses we couldn't even think of how to do business without the internet now.
So now that we've got everything connected to the internet, where is the next wave of value?
* Business Intelligence. We've got all this data, now how do we use it to make decisions. Current x86 hardware *can* do this but 64 bit x86 servers are much better for this. What they plan on using 64 bit on the desktop baffles me.
* Integration. Weather it's web services or ACSII files, as long as it allows one app to update another in real time, there's magic there. Unfortunately for the hardware manufacturers this doesn't mean a lot beyond greater bandwidth needs.
These are the two obvious areas I see a lot of organizations being able to invest money in and get a great return. Unfortunately on the whole, it isn't going to drive everyone to go out and buy new desktops and network infrastructure.
In regard to the software industry in general: There's still tons of innovation to be had. Look at reporting in general... Crystal Reports is so bad yet nothing else out there does it better. Someone start a serious competitor to crystal please!
There are product categories we haven't even thought of yet. Software that can make people more efficient and solve problems that in the past had to rely on luck.
There's still lots of value for us to deliver and lots of people that will write us big checks to deliver that value. We just can't get away with selling e-commerce.com.web.enabled.virtual.stores to dogfood stores (Yea, pay $20 to ship 50lbs of $10 dogfood.... the customers will love it!) anymore.
...and it ain't coming back. What we are seeing is a regression to the mean.
In the Internet days, major enterprises with traditional business models watched in horror as Amazon appeared to make the whole world obsolete. Priceline, nothing more than a travel agent, at one time had a higher market cap than all the major US airlines combined. This was a historic misallocation of capital, comparable to the overinvestment in radio in the 1920s.
Every CEO in America asked himself whether a pimply geek like Jeff Bezos could blow up out of nowhere and destroy his whole business just like that. We know how stupid that was in hindsight, but fear is an incredibly powerful motivator. The result was a tremendous amount of IT overspending. And for those of us who were right in the middle of it, it was rational at the time!
I think that was honestly the laziest review I've seen in a long time.
It sounded as though the reviewer got irritated and didn't even finish reading the book, or the review. The review was first draft writing at it's worste; clearly illustrating the reviewers bias, and ignorance.
He trashes the authors writing style, then talks about how clear it is. Then he reminds us all how sloppy the whole thing was. Which is it?
The reviewer takes talking out of both sides of his mouth to a whole new and exciting level as he goes on about the author's qualifications, and then points out that nothing original was said.
Over all,
Not a bad book review. But I would leave it alone and not waste my time with it... if I had the choice.
All else being equal is a presupposition to what is presented here and in most stories posted on /. The end user is the final arbitrator and, as far as I can tell, the end user decided with Win 95 and Office 97 that things were good enough, they just worked. This is reflected in the growing stickiness in Windows users who are slow to upgrade. The GUI is good enough, the apps suffice and even if a new killer app comes along it's unlikely to be the impetus to change that was Visical or Lotus 123. Linux will gain a larger share as Windows apps and FOSS apps become commodities, indistinguishable from one another. But the IT industry now works under the hood out of the limelight and no one has to stay abreast of their innovations in order to have an edge over the competitors (excepting those industries which still rely on modelling using the bleeding edge of the technological curve). It's been done. It just works and "some guy/girl" in the office pool can undertake to learn Access or Excel without going to night school. The only thing that will change the business use of IT products is something to come along that again gives an obvious advantage to early adopters, but this is nowhere on the horizon. The only thing in the pike is more better, a la 64 bit dual core chips.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
really, speculative bubbles have been with us since before we even had markets per se.
As someone who did quite well in never forgetting basic investing rules - for example, while I participated in many IPOs - and still do - it was only with an average amount of $1000 with my typical stock purchase in "normal" stocks being $10,000 - and I always watched the IPO lockup expirations and sold out of most stocks at least enough to cover money in at the 90, 180, or when it peaked beyond any reason.
The concept that certain firms were worth more than all of Japan was, quite clearly to all but those dazzled by the bright tech promises, insane.
So some of us employed strategies that actually worked during other speculative bubbles - laddering investments so that while one might own 400 shares of Red Hat today, i started with 100 and bought in and out when people got overly excited or depressed - diversifying investments so that it was never too much in one place - paying off a lot of my mortgage so the refinance I just signed has me owning half my house (the down payment was from buying/selling MSFT on product release bubble and inevitable downgrade) - but those who didn't probably will never learn.
Face it, having half of all human wealth and production go into tech is just plain insane.
Note: I still own MSFT and RHAT - just not as much as if I'd never diversified - and as a result, the "crash" never really hurt me too much.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
But if you think of having the best programmers in the world working in the projects as opposed to just a few countries, then there is real progress. To think that all best talent in India and other 3rd world countries is just the same as the average programmers here, is simply racist and ultimately wrong.
As a CS researcher, a lot of the authors that I read are Indian and Chinese, and they come up with really original shXt (like the fastest factorization algorithm known to mankind, just a few months ago -India-).
They are not the enemy. The enemy are the big guys that hire us, turn us against each other and exploit the heck out of us: the companies. The same guys that lauch unreasonable projects and expect us to come up with reliable solutions without adequate time to actually do those things.
Cheap programmers does not mean bad programmers. And expensive programmers does not mean good programmers.
No one seems to care that the traitorous, neoliberal politicians sold our geek jobs out to H1Bs and to outsourced 3rd world labor. I say indict, try, and convict for treason (in a court of law) all the politicians who sold us out, along with the CEOs who did the same, and then sentence them to death and execute them in the electric chair, as all traitors should be executed, by rule of law, and then we can get America back on track.
I think you mean neocons.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
A. Cisco
B. Va-Linux
C. Juniper
D. JD Uniphase
E. Broadcast.com
F. Microsoft
G. Real Media
H. Netscape
I. Nortel
J. Lucent
Of all those companies.... hmmm.. Nortel took the worst beating. They were nearly Enron like, with books being reviewed, quarterly announcements being investigated. JDS was the biggest get-rich quick, stock that went from $10 to about $240 per share.... Cisco was the most overvalued, at one time being the 2nd biggest company in the world.... Netscape's Jim Barksdale was the worst manager, getting anally reamed by Microsoft and doing nothing about it. Mark Cuban made out like the biggest bandit, selling Broadcast.com and buying the Dallas Mavs.
Of all those companies, the only buy and hold there is Juniper.
...just look at the American auto industry. First we owned the market and let the technology stagnate for decades. Then the foreign auto makers came along and taught us a thing or two. Especially the Japanese auto industry. At first we laughed at their small, cheap cars, but eventually they owned the auto market and we were the joke. In our effort to compete, we dumped our workforce and hired cheap labour elsewhere. We pilfered their designs and made our own knock-offs. Once we got the money, we bought them and now the whole world is worse off for it. There are really only a small number of auto makers and there is no "bubble" for the auto industry. The quality is poor and the costs are high. Expect IT to mimic this in every way. It already is...
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
.. likewise!
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I am not quite sure why IT is equated to e-commerce. They are two different things. If anything, I think e-commerce has a very stable future, and has matured greatly over the last few years. The bubble wasn't all about e-commerce, it was about e-everything (and e-nothing). It was a frenzy that we have hopefully learned our lesson from, because a lot of it just made no sense. IT != e-commerce.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
think of the fastest-factorization-algorithm-known-to-man-kind as a sort of high score.
many different people occupy the slot, if you want to give the entire population of indian programmers credit because one indian happens to currently occupy it (and somehow insinuate that makes them better programmers then "us"), then you sir are a racist.
Brent's Factorization Method, Class Group Factorization Method, Continued Fraction Factorization Algorithm, Direct Search Factorization, Dixon's Factorization Method, Elliptic Curve Factorization Method, Euler's Factorization Method, Excludent Factorization Method, Fermat's Factorization Method, Legendre's Factorization Method, Lenstra Elliptic Curve Method, Number Field Sieve, Pollard p-1 Factorization Method, Pollard Rho Factorization Method, Prime Factorization, Prime Number, Quadratic Sieve, Quiteprime, Trial Division, Veryprime, Williams p Plus 1 Factorization Method
bite my glorious golden ass.
No way! I don't remember when I bought anything but groceries, gas and movie tickets _not_ on the web. I also trade stocks, manage my bank account, bills, etc. completely online. The bubble has burst, but the technologies have stayed. If you recall, five years ago we didn't have much of what we have today in terms of e-commerce and e-everythingelse.
Fry 'em all! Fry, Baby, Fry!
eat shiat and bark at the moon
That's my take on it, any way. I've watched business people come and go over decades. They always do the same thing, latch onto whatever is known to be hot and get greedy, until the industry has beaten the theme to death and there is no more money to be made. They make a lot of money in the mean time but in the end only the few who quit while they're ahead have made the real money. For the rest, it's all on paper and easy come easy go.
Technology was obviously an example in the 90s. Everybody thought that all they had to do to make money was be involved in IT. A lot of them made great money, unfortunately the expectations got so crazy that stocks surged to unreasonable valuations and eventually corrected quite naturally. So now business people have a really bad taste in their mouth when they think of technology, "I got burned before" they think and avoid it like the plague.
Today what's hot is the financial sector and banking. Take a look at the stock market today, it is driven by the financial sector. These business people have become geniuses again, making easy money. My buddies at the London School of Economics say they're all going to become investment bankers. My friends from comp sci are working at financial institutions. See, the same shit's happening all again, the new bubble is in finance.
And business people are sooo smart to be making money where everyone else is making money. Of course, until this bubble pops too. Then everyone will have a bad taste in their mouth about banking and finance.
It's kind of a funny game. This is what happens in markets where people chase trends. There is not a lot of IT spending these days, nor a lot of research and development in technology. Both are short sighted mistakes, driven by the psychology of business people who will easily pass up on tomorrow's opportunities for profits today.
Fry the neoliberal free-traitors! Fry 'em all! I wanna pull the switch.....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I think you mean neocons.
I do NOT mean neocons. Neocon is really just a buzzword; neocon is properly a subset of neoliberal.
rLook, you need some basic education, and I aint got the time to do it. I recommend google....
But at least you made a sensical comment....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
no argument here....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
It was a time when if you knew a little HTML you could pull down a 6 figure salary(Minot exaggeration ,but not by much). The skills did not justify the pay... Now it is assumed that you know HTML C++ Java as a matter of course at any entry level position. There will never be $80,000 entry level positions anymore. But with time and experience, those salaries are out there.
Where is the section blaming IT losses on the american programmer? No truly current IS/IT management book could possibly be complete without it... Bulletin just in ... no american programmers are left to blame for stupid management disasters .... interesting ... american programmer chapter deleted ... Bulletin Just in .... corporation x has just announced that all management functions have been transfered offshore to cut costs ..... very interesting no management left to blame for stupid bored decisions ... Bulletin just in ... corporation x bored of directors has announced they are moving the company off shore to cut costs. very incrediably interesting ... corporation x has moved itself beyond the protection of US Legal system ... Bulletin just in... american programmer who replaced database analyst at corporation x with a computer program circa 1990 has just announced he has built a computer program to replace corporation x.... bulletin just in .... lyrics of country song playing from offshore ... what was i thinking ... bulletin just in ... they weren't ...
The technology sector has been cyclical for quite a long time. No one can predict the future. In the long run, all things being equal, then IT spending will spread out evenly over a market with perfect competition. But all things will never be equal, and you will have booms & busts along the way. Oh, and "in the long run, we're all dead" (John Maynard Keynes).
Find something you like doing and do it. If IT turns your crank, then stick around. You will get better at it and be rewarded appropriately. If you are not, seek a new employer or start your own business. If the entire industry dries up & moves offshore, then work on FOSS projects as a hobby and find a new line of employment. When you're feeling bitter, call the helpdesk hot line and demand that they ship you an "Any" key via FedEx immediately.
Here's an interesting article from the Harvard Business Review.
3 520&t=technology
http://workingknowledge.hbs.edu/pubitem.jhtml?id=
Pretty much Nicholas Carr postulates that IT has become a commodity and that companies can't get compettitive advantage out of it, however he does note that managing a commodity badly can rapidly remove compettitive advantage. Therefore companies should be tight fisted with IT spending, follow not lead and focus on what could go wrong rather than looking to the future.
IT's rapidly becoming another utility, soon you'll pay by the Mb for web services! I guess our job will be just like that at the other utilities, make sure the stuff in the pipes or wires keeps flowing, be it data, gas or power!
Here's his new rules for IT managers...
Spend less. Studies show that the companies with the biggest IT investments rarely post the best financial results. As the commoditization of IT continues, the penalties for wasteful spending will only grow larger. It is getting much harder to achieve a competitive advantage through an IT investment, but it is getting much easier to put your business at a cost disadvantage.
Follow, don't lead. Moore's Law guarantees that the longer you wait to make an IT purchase, the more you'll get for your money. And waiting will decrease your risk of buying something technologically flawed or doomed to rapid obsolescence. In some cases, being on the cutting edge makes sense. But those cases are becoming rarer and rarer as IT capabilities become more homogenized.
Focus on vulnerabilities, not opportunities. It's unusual for a company to gain a competitive advantage through the distinctive use of a mature infrastructural technology, but even a brief disruption in the availability of the technology can be devastating. As corporations continue to cede control over their IT applications and networks to vendors and other third parties, the threats they face will proliferate. They need to prepare themselves for technical glitches, outages, and security breaches, shifting their attention from opportunities to vulnerabilities
you need some basic education
you made a sensical comment
un-fucking-believable.
SENSICAL = NOT NONSENSICAL
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Comment removed based on user account deletion
When they were the only game in town (basically) we didnt' know any better. but since linux has matured, there is NO excuss for people (IT) to not create the next big thing..
i wasn't part of the 'dot-coN' boom..directly, but i was involved (personally, on my own) in making a software program which was a niche for the automoble industry. i guess because so much $ was going for crap and fraudulant stuff then (around 1997) i could not get any funds to market or improve my code (it needed to taken from dos and put into windoze or linux).
even tho i did EVERYTHING right (had a business plan, put my own money and time into the project, had a product fully-functioning, and had actually paying customers and prospects for my creation) the bastard banks and vc's just laughted at me. i guess they thought having something 'legit' was rediculous.
anywaze, this didn't daunt me in thinking about and creating other projects that would be easier for me to 'sell' on my own, or with less help/money.
and more importantly.. it did not keep me from enjoying the joy & wonder of those 'early' InterNet experiences... you know, when we 'met that special' someone in cyberspace...and..and... had our heart broken by them :(
well, those thoughts and the ones like when I (we), for the first time, downloaded, installed, read the license agreement (not) and got RealPlayer working on my 486 sx 25 mhz with 8 megs!!
or the fulfillment, when i found and installed B32 for windoze 3.1 (you remember, the little patch/prog that aloud us to run 32 bit windoze programs (sorta ;)..
or, remember:'Pc Speaker' program--- u remember, the program for 'tight-wades' like me that refused to put soundcards in their computers.... yearrrsss after they came out! It aloud you to play basically any & all audio through your little pc's speaker!
ahhhhnd the first time we got to dL our first cd of our favorite rock star in less than an hour!
well, just like 'those good ol daze', i believe (and try and work at) creating one of those exciting ideas. many of the old ideas need to be 're-dun' as '*The People Of World* wait... for someone(s) to do what the US government (shoulda, coulda, woulda), in putting down that great 'Technological Imeding Monster'---- m$. :)
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
"The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government."
What's interesting to me about this tidbit is that it the numerous laws are both a cause and effect of corruption. Whenever a straightforward, simple law is passed, someone will find a way to scam around it. If they are devious enough, they can't be charged under current law, so a new law has to be written to cover it. This is what happens with campaign finance reform every few years.
Conversely, people always want to get loopholes, exceptions, special funding or other benefits from the government. A lot of these actually end up as laws, especially if you contribute liberally to party leaders...
We are the 198 proof..
Not really. Unions only work for jobs that can't otherwise be outsourced. Construction on buildings has to be done here, the police have to patrol our streets, teachers have to work in our schools, boats need to be unloaded at our docks. But there's no reason that our software has to be written locally or that our server farms have to be located in this country. Unionization would kill the IT industry.
The older baby boomers, who have been running he U.S. companies since the mid-90's, are now in their late 50's and thinking about retirement. They're getting there companies gussied-up for one last big stock push, then it's bail-out time with the golden parachute. They are spending money on consulting, but not as much on IT as they are on consulting firms that specialize in "apple polishing". These consulting companies come in and slash payroll and send jobs overseas. Sure, they improve the bottom line in the short term, but at what cost to the company's long term future? The Wall Street analysts get a whiff of this smoke and mirror approach, and the stock price soars. The big boys in the corporate borad room lard big stock options and bonuses on themselves, while those lucky enough to keep their jobs get a token raise, if any at all. Next step, reduce benefits, and figire out a way to gut the company pension plan...
So basically, I am saying: "they are not just cheap programmers, some of them are indeed good programmers". At no point in my post I made any comparison.
And what you are understanding from the above phrase is: "we suck and they are better".
Are you a functional illiterate? or just playing dumb?
Or maybe there is something deeper going on here.
I said that indian programmers have some really good things. According to you now I am some sort of indian supremacist, swastika and all.
And the moderators seem to agree with you. The conclusion is that in Slashdot, it is forbidden to say anything good about programmers outside of the US. Complementing others is now considered treason.
I was right to post this comment anonymously. Otherwise I might end up in some black list. You would be doing a post saying that putting me in a black list is a matter of "national security" and then the patriotic moderators would mod you up.
Did the white house took over this forum?
Pledge of allegiance to post comments, anyone?
Pleeeeeeeease :)
I think we're all having a crisis of competance. The fact is that we managed to get the whole western world working on an IT backbone. Why? Because it really is the best thing since sliced bread. Hardware is getting cheaper, as is bandwidth which evens the playing field, making the market tougher. I can understand why people would be scared about this... I am.
Then I remember that people bought IT even when it was hideously expensive. Now that its cheap even more people want it... its just that the margins won't be as large. So we won't be rock stars, with huge cars and houses - if /. is right, rockstars won't be rockstars fror much longer anyway.
It doesn't matter how many people can generate code. The way technology is progressing high level languages will go the way of assembler. I created a Diary in Cocoa in 30 minutes using Core Data. I can now see that a database app I built in 2 months using J2EE can be built in 2 weeks, with almost no coding (this was only a small project - J2EE was over kill). Whats my point? I can now create a solid, bespoke data orientated application in 2 weeks. That means I can afford to pitch to SOHOs!
It doesn't matter how many MB of code you produce if all your doing is following somebody elses specs. As always what is important is talent, creativity and the right tools.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
is that you have no idea of what you don't know.
In fairness to the people you malign (ie. decision makers) they are usually pretty good at knowing when to call into help (ie. consultants) and when to call it themselves.
If I could be bothered I could rewrite your post straight back at ya, instead I'll give you an executive summary:
Computer programming is just typing a list of actions into a computer. Its simple.
You may now start howling about enterprise level architectures and the science of computation...
Because if we have another DotCom bubble, the
real estate speculators will end up pricing many
people out of their apartments and make buying
a home almost impossible for most where the "instant" yuppies they are trying to cater
to are expected to show up.
No thanks.
I'd rather see a strong job market that can keep
people (read: your average joe/jane) employed and
the price of rents/real estate remain mostly unaffected.
While it's not as "sexy" as the previous
DotCom bubble that made some people millionairs
almost overnight, it would ensure more people have
good jobs that (hopefuly) last (provided the
companies don't screw up and look to India for short term gain.
)
The central problem is that companies obviously made the false assumption that IT is easy and just fire your knowledge workers and pass that baton to sales and managers. They then made the false assumption that because IT is "automating" tasks, which is only partially true, that IT gets easier and so they let more IT departments go. Then they made another false assumption that Indians can do the same job cheaper, that managment would be minimal, that they would read their minds and come up with "cool software" and services exactly as they needed....proving that all the failed US IT projects by US teams would be rectified....and if not, at least via some cost savings if and when the outsorced work matured. They then hired semi-competent Busienss techies thinking its just a managment issue at this point.
Forget that more and more busienss processes, infrastructure, profitability centers, support, innovation, and competitiveness is increasingly BASED ON IT now. Forget that as good and pervasive as technology is becoming, thats its also getting more complex. Forget that busienss people STILL DONT KNOW TECHNOLOGY, and so make false assumptions based on surfing the web in their underwear at home on the weekends, or what some 70 year old IT illiterate CEO spits out in a boardroom.
The fact is that as IT complexity, diversity, dependence, innovation, and customer service moves into every facet of business the next 10 years or so, the shear number, variety and volume of IT needs and staff requirements will have to be addressed in the US. So I think business is stuck and will have to address that, especially if they keep getting burned by offshoring as is the case in some instances recently. Because project management and senior IT managment really has not solved the original problems of NOT knowing IT, not coming from an IT background, or having little knowledge in building good clean spec docs for software programmers, or evaluations of new technologies, this "band-aide" of firing professionsals in US IT departments and hiring a single CIO with a beefier salary and a handfull of managers will continue to fail, in my opinion.
U.S. PROGRAMMERS = INNOVATION