Slashdot Mirror
The IT Industry's Red Shift Theory
Stony Stevenson writes "Sun Microsystems' CTO, Greg Papadopoulos has come out with a Red Shift Theory for IT which posits that an 'elite group of companies are consuming inordinate amounts of IT infrastructure, well beyond most other businesses, and that their demand is growing exponentially. This trend, Papadopoulos maintains, has implications not just for IT's most insatiable consumers, but for the structure of the computing industry itself. It's not just about how many CPU cycles a company uses. Papadopoulos argues that red-shift companies will enjoy exponential business growth in the coming years. Blue-shift companies — those whose processing needs aren't exploding — will grow at about the same rate as GDP, he says.'"
I don't know what's more disgusting: how clumsy and obviously marketeering the comparison is, or that some people might actually swallow it. I feel like I'm being sold something by a fast-talking Australian on a shopping channel.
Ok actually let's not. Let's play a little imagination game.
/. reader, to fix my broken visualization of his analogy. If you can't, I have to say to Popdopopdoloslous, you have lost me.
Picture the whole of IT companies and companies that use IT as a spherical microcosm. The normal physical dimensions in this microcosm are instead dimensions of economy, scale, and technology. Like our universe is puportedly doing, this sphere is expanding. Now, because he claims these "elite" companies are basically exponentially distancing themselves from the other companies, they could arguably be on the extents of the expanding sphere. Although there are fewer of these companies they require much more of our microcosmic IT space. Fair enough. Moving away from us, and red shifted from our perspective in the exact center of the sphere.
So far, so good I guess. Then we have blue-shifted companies. In this microcosm, in order to become blue-shifted to my perspective, you'd have to be heading away from using more advanced technology and also using less of it. Frankly, I can't come up with a single company in the world that's doing that and is successful. If you don't look at in on a time-scale of a year or two, but rather of fifty, one hundred or even five hundred years, it's pretty damn clear that every single company is red-shifted from the perspective of an individual in the center of the microcosmic sphere.
End game.
So I put it to you,
TLF
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
Maybe if they'd used it correctly. But their use of "blue shift" is completely inconsistent with the metaphor.
(A blue shift happens when things are getting closer to one another, not further apart. These supposed companies not accelerating would look exactly as red-shifted to the accelerating ones as vice versa.)
Not true. Economies can and do grow exponentially which means that the average wealth per person growth exponentially as well (assuming population is constant) as do companies (on average).
This growth must slow down eventually but the number of customers is not the limiting factor because they can spend exponentially more as they get exponentially richer.
I would have thought the GDP was exponential since money tends to breed more money.
Even if it wasn't, wouldn't the presence of exponentially growing companies force the GDP to go exponential after a while. Maybe such companies will quickly die before they get big enough to do that, but a bad business strategy that leads to a quick death sounds like a bad business strategy (modulo the Enrons and SCOs of the world).
You have a very good point.
However... Your money is based on debt. Debt increases exponentially and requires exponential growth in the economy to service it.
Deleted
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ GDP_(real)_growth_rate
all the numbers listed in that wikipedia page are the k in the exponential differential equation dx/dy = ky.