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.'"

Comments

Re:Cause and Effect

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Correct, companies that are experiencing (or anticipating) exponential growth in revenue grow their hardware by a similar amount. Hardware is replacing assembly line workers, in some industries, as the cost of production that has to scale with the size of business. Imagine if the same thing was said about a car company and assembly line workers? People would automatically know that exponential growth, or disasterous overreaching, were coming. But fuzz the logic by refering to computers and suddenly an assinine statement becomes news.

Damn social scientists unable to distingush correlation and causation.

Re:'Exponential' fails common sense.

[TheRaven64]

Even if you make something that all 6 billion people will buy, you're still not going to be able to maintain exponential growth very long before everybody is a customer. Not necessarily. You can grow the number of customers by a small amount, but increase the number of things you sell them. Take a look at Apple. While previously they got most of their money from Macs, now most of it comes from iPods and iTunes. If they sold everyone who owned a Mac an iPod, then they doubled their sales without increasing their customer base at all. If they can then sell them an iPhone as well, then they have grown their business even more without increasing their customer base.

Of course, eventually you need to be producing everything people use and consuming all available resources. Then, if you want to keep growing, you need to start doing something really novel (asteroid mining, that kind of thing), but that won't happen for a long time. Exponential growth is completely possible for short periods; Sun experienced it themselves in the .com boom.

Re:Inventing Terminology for CEO's

[Stradivarius]

There's a neat trick you can play with Markov chains to generate this sort of text. It may not be as good as your handcrafted version, but it makes it easier to generate larger texts.

The algorithm basically works by feeding in a sample text, from which you generate a statistical model of what words are likely to follow any given N-word sequence. Then you select at random which of the possible suffix words to output given the previous N output words. (Obviously you need to provide the initial conditions, i.e. the first N words of output, to the algorithm). If you allow punctuation to be considered part of a word, it seems to produce reasonably grammatical sentences too.

Picking N=2 seems to work pretty well. I imagine if we fed in a bunch of buzzword-laded management texts we'd get some great results.

Re:"Sir, we need to upgrade our infastructure..."

[Anonymous Coward]

You joke, but a friends company was hauling in servers and servers for months because of client running an adult-contact website having an exponential need for both space and bandwidth.

Re:Every week

[Aceticon]

As somebody who does software for a living, i can tell you that the biggest factor in the success of a company is ... business processes.

In the big picture of how a company is successfull, software is a tool, networking technologies are tools and the Internet is a tool. It all boils down to people and organization - individuals and the way they work together.

IT is something that can fit into the business and can empower the people to work beter - it's not a silver bulet which will magically transform a mismanaged company into a growing, thriving business.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but from someone that has been working in IT for many years, across several industries, it's my experience that the best success stories are not "IT transforming companies", instead they came from "companies that mold IT to their needs".

Every company I've seen is still mired in red tape and completely backwards use of much of the technology we require to survive.

Red tape is an organizational problem, not a technological problem. Bringing IT in without solving the underlying problem will just result in adding new layers to the bureaucracy (been there, seen it happen, not a pretty sight).

The truth is, IT brings with it whole new time and money sinks (license control, networking/systems administration, IT security, software development and costumization, outside consultants, etc) which would not be there without IT. In truth, as many of us in IT have seen again and again, often the blind, vendor-pushed, fashion-following approach to deploying IT in a company results in wasted money and a decrease in productivity (for that company, the vendors are probably quite happy).

During the Boom years, many companies where managed by people that did not understood that technology is a tool for empowering the business, not the other way around. Countless managers let themselfs be taken with sentences such as "utilizing technology to its fullest potential", "software that can boost our capabilities even farther", "the technology we require to survive", "streamline our business the way software is capable of doing" and other such sales pitches and so let their companies be taken for wild rides, where the only ones that really profited where the vendors. Hopefully, most learned their lesson, and the latest generation of of CxOs is beter at separating the technological wheat from the chaff.

PS: Even though i'm someone which if often brought in to help clean up the mess done during one of those "wild rides" (said mess having been done often enough by the unholy association of software vendors and IT consultancies), I would much rather loose that part of my work in the future that be faced again and again with the kind of raw sewage which is all that has been left from the blood sucking feeding frenzy done by the above mention vendors and consultancies.

PPS: Yeah, i'm sour about this.