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Cloud To Create 14 Million Jobs? Not So Much
jfruh writes "Did you hear about the study from Microsoft and IDC (PDF), declaring that adoption of cloud technologies would create 14 million jobs? Well, don't believe the hype. The study posts that, once small and medium business can use cloud products to just eliminate their IT department, they'll use those savings to hire people for their core business. It's a dubious proposition, and one that wouldn't be good news for IT workers even if things do play out that way."
The revolution of automotive transport put a lot of horse dung collectors out of work too. Society should advance. Period. That that means some jobs are erased is a good thing. Whenever jobs are erased, it represents a freeing of human minds to focus on even more productive tasks.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I can't imagine how anything could be worse than my IT department.
The IT monkeys will still be around and needed to keep your PC running, it's the actual skilled IT that will be losing work.
So one person does around a hundred different jobs as needed.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
When are we going to accept that technology SHOULD be used to eliminate jobs and create more free time for more people? We need a SOCIAL change, urgently. Work shouldn't always be about moving wealth upwards while we scramble around in a "Hunger Games"-type society.
Isn't the point of the cloud to move all these services to central locations where they are managed by fewer people?
has everyone turned into an old jewish man?
Once we automate the factories, we will hire more managers and executives.
Once we outsource the call centers we will hire more technicians.
Once we use all the oil we will invent something else.
I have prime swampland for sale in the Sahara too.
We have to get use to the fact that not all people will be producers in our society and that percentage of non producers will continue to increase. Does that mean that they have no right to a decent life? This is the future we wanted, where things are becoming more automated and peoples lives become easier. Is it really making anything easier. I would say no until we have a sea change in our socioeconomic views.
Silence is a state of mime.
Why wouldn't the actual skilled IT people go work for the cloud service providers, again?
I'd much rather work for Google in one of their data centers than for a company being the "windows is broke, tell the customer to reboot," guy.
The "cloud" paradigm will only transition IT jobs from in-house to managed external providers. The IT staff will be cut from physical locations, but managed IT providers will be looking to expand into the cloud environment and will inevitably hire the ex-IT folks. IT equilibrium.
How did they account for the loss of jobs in the core business due to lower quality of service, lost data, stolen data, etc?
Fundamentally no one wants to be in charge of spinning disks, and will savings from management voodoo make up for the cost of inserting a profitable intermediary?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Because those jobs will be concentrated in fewer service provider centers, requiring fewer people to manage them.
The study posts that, once small and medium business can use cloud products to just eliminate their IT department, they'll use those savings to hire people for their core business.
Or they'll just put it towards profits and big bonuses for the CEO and senior staff, creating no jobs at all.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The study posts that
The word you were looking for is "posits". And yes, it sure does suck if you were a redundant IT worker. Let's hope you learned something from slashdot after all these years.
and it leads to increased efficiency. Those people can on to fulfill other functions. This is mainly the reason we're not all farmers anymore like in the stone age.
But they'll be in China and India.
Still need security, Still need a networking staff, what you wont need is the DBAs, the active directory guys, but networking, hardware etc... they will be needed. If the internet doesn't work your cloud isn't going to do you much good.
Because those jobs will be concentrated in fewer service provider centers, requiring fewer people to manage them.
Isn't that what progress is supposed to be about: accomplishing the same tasks with less labor?
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
My boss doesn't see the sense in off loading his IT infrastructure into the hands of others.
You see data loss is not insurable, and if we can not trust ourselves to not fuck up, we sure
as hell cannot trust a 3rd party who doesnt care about the saftey of our data at all.
My job is safe.
BTW ask Microsoft which cloud service they use..
Oh... they dont eat their own dog food.
Funny that.
Of course. However the claim that the IT monkeys will be going away is ludicrous. It's the people behind the scenes that will be reducing in number.
... but on my counting, the result is not *more* jobs, but simply *more interesting* ones.
Why wouldn't the actual skilled IT people go work for the cloud service providers, again?
You can't insert a profitable intermediary in between the same IT people and the old company without cutting jobs somehow. Supposedly centralization will result in fewer people doing more work, so less employees allow a layer of profitable intermediaries.
So you'll have 10 former IT guys and 3 jobs. The other 7, well there's always soylent green. Oh well.
The other problem is just being realistic, the 10 former IT guys will be in the US and the 3 new jobs will be in India. So its more like all 10 will go soylent green.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
If the industry shifts and you no longer need as many IT staff, so be it. Throughout history, advances in technology have wiped out entire professions - when was the last time you met a fletcher, tanner or a pencil and paper draughtsman? This would be no different. Technology progress inevitably makes some people's professions redundant, but they also open new doors. It is for those at risk of obsolescence to spot the trend and make the transition to one of those shiny new doors before their existing one slams shut in their face.
I say bring it on.
I've very recently been doing some digging into "the cloud" as requested by my superiors. All marketing/tech literature that I find from Microsoft is aimed towards entities that cannot afford proper admins to run their infrastructure or entities that regularly encounter huge peak demand. It also gives the entity the flexibility to suddenly scale up if they need more resources for a corner case, without the large capital investment required for in-house infrastructure.
Everything that I was read, listened to, or watched from MS has been quite level-headed in which cases to use the cloud.
I haven't had time to RTFA as the end of the day nears and I'm working on something else, but I find it strange for MS to do an about-face and claim cloud as an actual replacement for a proper in-house IT.
it's the actual skilled IT that will be losing work.
Do you really believe that? Skilled IT will always be able to supply value to a business, regardless of whether the data or server is located.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Because those jobs will be concentrated in fewer service provider centers, requiring fewer people to manage them.
Isn't that what progress is supposed to be about: accomplishing the same tasks with less labor?
I view your assumption that the cloud would be progress with amusement. I'm making popcorn.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
And any skilled IT monkey who gets the cloud job but has a social conscience can hack at will all the smaller companies using their cloud services. "Anonymous hackers" simply means "guys who don't work for your company but can access all your data from their cloud job". lol
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Three strange financial assumptions:
1) Cloud can only make money as a new intermediary by efficiency, having less people employed. However, they could employ the same amount of people by selling data.
2) If scalability always worked, we'd only have one car company, one paper printing company, one taxi company, one book store, one food store... For their own sake I hope cloud stuff scales up that well, or we'll end up back where we started (at the usual great expense both monetary and human costs)
3) Big companies always insource when its cheaper overall than paying the outsourcer. Ideal minimum cost would seem to be keep enough work and servers inhouse to keep a precise integer number of employees busy and outsource any fractional FTE to outsourcer. But can a company make money of outsourcing fraction FTE worth of cloud computing from each corporation? My guess is, in the long run, no.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The other problem is just being realistic, the 10 former IT guys will be in the US and the 3 new jobs will be in India. So its more like all 10 will go soylent green.
I think you forgot to include that one or two of them will come back to the company as contractors when the cloud doesn't prove to be as amazing as first described in the sales pitch. Once the bugs start comng out and problems arise, a few of them will be hired back (probably at much higher rates than they originally worked) to solve the issues that are coming up so that the company can continue to operate "business as usual".
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
...you might as well walk away. What follows is always bullshit.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
"The cloud" doesn't get rid of the need for computers at the office, or networks, or people to support it. It also doesn't elimiante the need for people who understand how all this "cloud" pixie dust works, and most importantly someone who knows what to do when "the cloud" goes down randomly like last week and your website suddenly doesn't work.
Less people running small data centers? Probably, if the hype can be believed. But a lot of people aren't sold on this.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Tech can't be labor saving and job creating. If it creates new job categories it's job creating but it's not labor saving. If it's labor saving it increases unemployment. End of story.
Pick one, or tell us it's job-neutral due to shifting skills; but don't try to feed "saves labor" to management while simultaneously feeding "creates jobs" to the unwashed masses to make us feel good.
The replacement of in-house IT by storage and apps in the cloud has been predictable and predicted for about 15 years now. Enough time to have gotten some retraining.
I used to say that the conventional wisdom that your data was safest on a disk or tape in your basement would be inverted when it was realized that redundant internet server based storage run by specialists in IT would be superior in reliability. This was well before it was called the cloud. The kind of reliabilty Google was getting out of massive redundancy and some smarts in management s/w and hardware operations should have been enough of a clue over the last decade or so.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
VDI deployments... all you need is your iPAD
Isn't that what progress is supposed to be about: accomplishing the same tasks with less labor?
It's only meaningful progress if the benefits accrue to the average American worker. Otherwise, it's just further lining the pockets of the wealthy.
When productivity gains stop being broadly shared, Luddism starts to make sense. This is why massive concentration of wealth is a bad thing: it pits workers against innovation.
Sure you can. You assume that large companies are the ones who would be moving to this, when the summary specifically states small & mid-sized businesses "being able to use these services" would be where most of the creation would come from.
Small & mid-size. You know, the types of businesses that don't have dedicated IT departments, or who have hires in their IT departments who aren't 100% utilized. The types of companies where there's only a need for maybe 10 hours a week of IT support, for whom hiring a full time "IT guy" doesn't make financial sense. But if you take 4 companies that each need 10 hours a week of IT support and convince them to pay an equivalent amount, you just created a new job. Each client pays for their 10 hours/wk - a slight increase in their overall spend, but the guy who was providing that 10 hours / week as a sideline (let's call him "Bob, the sales and accounting guy") can spend that 10 hours a week on doing things that are more valuable to the company.
That's how many people the foresee it will take to prevent things like leap day bugs. Since obviously they don't have enough people to prevent it yet.
This "study" is there to just scare IT workers. If you don't know Microsoft Azure, you will be left behind, is what they are hinting at. With the hope that more developers will run out and learn Azure.
Let's just say that Azure has been a huge flop because even after all the marketing and resources that Microsoft throws at it, IT shops are not willing to migrate to Azure because that requires a rewrite of all applications and the cost of running your apps on Azure is actually higher than having hardware and software on premise. Majority of businesses do not need elasticity of a cloud because their cheapo commodity servers can handle the load just fine.
Honestly we fired the Exchange guy when we moved to Google mail for businesses for doing nasty things in the building, Think finding socks with.... DNA in them in the server room. and instead of replacing him management decided that "it's working, we dont need him" That worked for 60 days until Exchange imploded like it always does when left unattended.
I suggested that we move everyone to Google email for business until we can get things sorted. 90 days in, we have far less spam, zero downtime, zero problems, and all android and iphone people can sync everything perfectly everywhere. when that was discovered, management abolished all the crackberries, so now we dont have to run the damned crackberry server. Last department meeting they asked about any luck filling the position, we have had none as we have insane requirements for little to no pay. I mentioned we say screw it and eliminate the position and stay with Google.
Got a $1500 bonus out of that.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Labor-saving technologies are only viable in the market if they ultimately eliminate more human labor than they create. New technologies, apart from entertainment applications, *always* eliminate jobs in the long run. Either that or they don't get adopted.
Eliminating jobs is their primary purpose. Promising that they will create jobs is a direct lie intended to win the hearts and minds of the very people who will be put out of work.
Eliminating jobs is a *good* purpose. If the machines do our work for us, then we don't have to. Of course, there are economic consequences, especial since traditional capitalistic values don't work well in an environment with a very high percentage of automated labor. However, these are secondary concerns to the advancement of humanity.
No, they won't.
You'll still need that skilled person around, and in fact, they'll have to possess more skills than the "skilled" person they'll be hired to replace (6 months after the person they're replacing was terminated).
Why?
Because this person will have to deal with all the bullshit and problems that comes with pushing things to the Cloud. Those problems may be fewer, but they will be significantly more complex not only due to the nature of the networking involved and the different architecture, but also due to the inability to actually get in there and fix the core problem. Surprisingly, not many "Senior Windows Administrators" are even able to understand virtualization, let alone the Cloud.
Augmenting SMB networks with Cloud services for resilience and redundancy? Absolutely! But replacing them outright is a good way for a company to deep-six itself. Why Microsoft would sell their clients down the river to this degree is beyond me...
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
First of all, I don't know if I'd use the word "advance" -- I'm not entirely sure society has "advanced", as in improved. We seem to trade one indignity for another.
Second of all, while I'd agree that many of these changes are as a whole for the good of the broader economy, the process by which they occur is really harsh for the people involved.
It's a bit like saying that famine is good for poor countries, since they're killing off the excess people they can't feed. Sure, in the long run they've got fewer mouths to feed, but it's a helluva way to do it.
We really don't need another web browser, or another word processor, email client. The various niches have mostly been filled. What we're seeing with "clouds" are just an attempt to optimise costs. A cloud is just a mainframe people, built on TCP/IP instead of 3270 protocols.
So until architectures make a radical change we can expect IT & development jobs to become obsolete.
If quantum, Bio computing or more likely at the moment 3D printing come along with a major change it may restart growth, but till then all we'll get are bubbles like Apple or Facebook.
Deleted
Yes, unfortunately as time goes on we're going to have more and more people permanently out of work. It's a hurdle that we're going to have to get over as humans, and it will be a very, very high hurdle.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
If you're using "no dedicated IT department" as a criteria for defining what constitutes a "small business", then I'm afraid your definition is next to useless.
You can check out this link to help you better understand things.
For those following along at home: the term "small business" has a more defined meaning that what's used colloquially, especially when used (disingenuously) by politicians, pundits and, on occasion, unemployed plumbers, attemping to stoke populist rage.
As many people willing to have exactly the same product can share an environment. Because IT is all about trade offs and in many cases, the least common denominator wins.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Microsoft must be using the same bean counters as the Obama Admin. Play with some numbers, sprinkle with Fairy dust, make up an answer you like and present it as a real solution. This is beyond Quantum math, it's WTF Math. I just haven't figured out how to convince my banker I'm right.
Skilled IT will always be able to supply value to a business, regardless of whether the data or server is located.
Apparently also regardless of where they speak English or not.
14 Million Steve Jobs... I'm not sure what the world would look like with 14M of them....
It jobs are not a solution to the economy. You gotta make something as in M_A_N_U_F_A_C+_T+U_R_E
I work as a systems and solution architect at a company that has been offering "cloud" services for 9 years - well, we only started calling it "cloud" a year and a half ago, but the product didn't change, just the marketing pitch. Sure, I may be a bit biased because "cloud" is providing an excellent lifestyle for my family and myself, but the reality of how it affects our customers on a larger economic scale is much different than "the sky is falling" opinions I'm seeing in here.
Our customers are primarily enterprise software developers and vendors, so our experience is going to be somewhat different than what the average mom & pop IT shop will see, but maybe not.
What we provide our customers is specialized knowledge and capabilities in one specific area of the IT sphere. Our infrastructure is located "in the cloud" as far as our customers are concerned, with iron racked in 6 different locations in a total of 4 different countries. We take a HUGE design, provisioning, and maintenance burden off our customers.
And we have cost the jobs of not one single person in the IT departments or Development teams of our customers.
And here's why:
What our provisioning of cloud services has allowed these companies to do is scale in a way that would have been too expensive otherwise. Over the long haul, this means that the existing IT/Dev staff within these companies get to have a 50 to 100 fold greater impact with the work that they do. In turn, this creates more income for the companies that employ them. The companies that employ them see greater profits and margins from the areas that employ our services, and do what is a very rational thing for corporations to due: they INCREASE the size of these highly effective departments. They take IT staff and resources from failing projects, and pump them into the projects that are effective and profitable. They hire extra staff to increase the size of the departments with this extra revenue and margin.
That's how big business makes money. They kill the week departments and shift resources to the strong ones.
The net effect of our services to our customer staffing levels is invariably an increase. Without exception.
I don't know about standard corporate IT. I've never worked in that space. But if you are working for a development house that isn't already leveraging cloud services, or at least looking seriously at doing it, then it's time to fire your employer, before they get run over by their competition and leave you holding the bag when your paycheques stop coming on a regular basis.
Manager: Well, with this new cloud technology, we're saving $100K/year on hardware maintenance and replacement. Now, with that saving I propose we put the money toward some new IT projects..."
CEO: My pocket.
Manager: What?
CEO: That's money in my pocket. We can keep the status quo and still make me richer.
Manager: Really. We could put that money towards web development -- purchasing has been crying for a decent inventory application.
CEO: My pocket.
Manager: Or we could use it to hire someone else and give our current IT staff time for vacation and not working 80 hours per week.
CEO: Overtime exempt?
Manager: Well, yes.
CEO: My pocket.
And automation can put people out of work. No real mystery. If an IT department isn't automating to keep costs down, they aren't a good department.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The study posts that, once small and medium business can use cloud products to just eliminate their IT department, they'll use those savings to hire people for their core business.
This is the same faulty economic reasoning used to justify tax cuts for businesses to stimulate the hiring of new employees.
Business taxes are paid on net income after all expenses, including labour expenses, are paid. If a business can increase its net income by hiring more employees, then it will do so, thus raising net income before taxes, and also profit after taxes. The tax rate is irrelevant to the net income before taxes and so to the decision to whether to hire new employees.
If the market in which the business participates is free (or at least, free enough), then the prices in the marketplace are set by supply and demand. If at the price determined by the market the business can make more net income by hiring more employees to produce more product, it will do so, regardless of the tax rate. If the price determined by the market is not such that it makes sense for the business to produce more product, then it will not. All lowering the tax rate will do in second instance is increase the business's profit after taxes.
Similarly, if the business can reduce its expenses by moving its IT infrastructure to the cloud, doing so will increase its net income before taxes and its profit after taxes. If the market is free (free enough), the move to the cloud is irrelevant because if the business could sell more product by hiring more employees, it would already have done so.
Cloud To Create 14 Million Jobs? Not So Much
The man's dead people, get over it!
Also now that I think of it, why would anyone want to create 14 millions clones of Steve Jobs?
The 1960s and 70s called and they want their timeshare back.
Remember how great it was that the people were able to get their own computer and we didn't need to connect to some centralized server? Power to the personal computer! (fist in air) Yeah, those were the days, man.
And remember when your personal information was kept personal and not in plain view of advertisers?
And thats it!
Did anybody else read the headline as a cloud being used to create 14 million clones of steve jobs? I understand that he did great things for apple but isn't that a slightly excessive number.
few of them will be hired back (probably at much higher rates than they originally worked)
Contractors get no benefits/health insurance and each 100K of full-time salary can easily cost 160K-180K when you factor in all the benefits (health insurance, 401K matching, self-employed tax subsidies, paid vacation, the list goes on and on....).
This does not invalidate your point, but I'd add that if these employees are rehired as "contractors" at 50% higher rate, the company will likely end up saving money as a result (for CEO bonuses and such).
When productivity gains stop being broadly shared, Luddism starts to make sense.
No, it doesn't. If you have capacity for violent resistance, it's better to direct it towards changing the political system such that the fruits of progress can be enjoyed more broadly, rather than stopping progress altogether.
Friedrich Hayek, observing the digging of the Panama Canal, looked down on the work being done.
He asked, “Why are they doing this with shovels? Why not heavy equipment?”
The answer was simple: “It’s about jobs.”
His reply: “Then why not use spoons instead?”
Social networking websites are really just putting your personal information on the cloud. You could do the same thing with your own website and have much more control. It's easy to setup a blog on your own server or make a personal information page. But since it's even easier to do it on the cloud (eg. Facebook), that's what most people end up doing. Never mind the fact that all of your information is being exploited.
When businesses start putting their data on the cloud, I'm sure the Jews will be happy to sell their trade secrets.
It's only meaningful progress if the benefits accrue to the average American worker. Otherwise, it's just further lining the pockets of the wealthy.
When productivity gains stop being broadly shared, Luddism starts to make sense. This is why massive concentration of wealth is a bad thing: it pits workers against innovation.
Washer women are also out of work for the most part. Buggy whip makers still survive, but they've moved On line as well. Things change over time, especially in a relatively new technology. We can't run out and legislate change away.
Your argument, in one form or another, has been raised about every work saving device ever made since the dawn of civilization. It was wrong then, and it hasn't improved in the thousand years since.
Doing the same amount of work cheaper is, by definition, a benefit that accrues to the average worker. Indeed to society as a whole.
We plant with plows, not dibble sticks. We harvest grain with machines, not fifty guys with scythes taking three weeks to cut 100 acres. Less guys. Less time. Cheaper bread.
Why should a small business have to maintain an IT department (even if it is only two guys) if web based services are all they really need?
Yeah, some of that money saved will be concentrated in the hands of the cloud owners. But not nearly as much as maintaining your own data center and IT staff. Money will be saved by the business.
The business will be healthier without that huge outlay of money. They can plow the savings int product development. They can lower their prices. The remaining workers can get a raise. The owner can buy a yacht. An extra few days of vacation can be granted. Christmas bonuses can be declared.
Even that part that (I suspect) you will hate the most, the owner buying a Yacht, will keep the yacht builder afloat (bad pun), and they will employ all sorts of folks, carpenters, engine mechanics, riggers, welders, probably even IT guys installing all the fancy systems on the boat.
Rich people spend their money.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
That's exactly what it does.
But we keep moving up the average quality of life. If we peg that enough decades back, 80% of us could stop working today and pay the 20% a big premium to keep it all rolling. And we could enjoy the quality of housing, autos, and health care of yesteryear with minimal advances, relatively speaking.
The problem is we can't reach nirvana.
Indeed, having Cloud services complement and augment a local infrastructure can be a good idea. However, most public cloud providers aren't doing this, and are bypassing the local infrastructure completely (assuming one exists in the first place). Hybrid and private clouds can make a lot of sense, but managers don't make the distinction.
And the question of productivity isn't being addressed. Many cloud systems are severely limited in performance, to the point that they can't compete with local systems. It isn't a 1:1 equivalence between LAN and Cloud. But business managers just hear Cloud and can't wait to jump. And then they become trapped in low performance closed systems, and it takes a major event for them to roll back and rebuild their local systems.
lets fire some people and then hire some other people. i think we might want
to talk about 'net job creation' instead of 'job creation'.
Sure they do.
On my shelf is a tome about how F. W. Woolworth started the "subsustence wage trap" by forcing people into inferior economic curves by being the only job in town but not enough to properly live on.
And you know it's a power trip for lots of those corp execs simply asking for extra hours of work out of salaried people "just because".
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Ive pushed huge on cloud in a K12 education environment where the demand for scalability vastly outstrips what I can possibly accommodate. My meeting with my staff last week, was to inform them they need to adapt or move along.
I have moved 3 primary services to SaaS / IaaS and I couldnt be happier. That being said, my top 3 in a 7 man workforce have changed their mindset and thinking from "nuts and bolts" to "empowering users and aligning IT with strategic goals / values".
To say I would need less manpower internally, is simply not correct. I need thinkers, and imaginations who can push things forward. Agreed, I will need less hdd replacers, and firmware updaters, but tbh thats automated mostly now anyway.
If you choose to sit on the sidelines in IT and not grow with the industry, then you will lose engagement. If you embrace the culture changes around you, and learn how to fit in and provide value, then you will have a job with me.
Cloud is not magic, it requires stealthy, intelligent and well thought out movements. My staff skills are going away from methodical and repetitive to a much higher level of thinking.
I say great, because Id much rather remunerate you for that any day of the week. Strangely enough, its also been significantly more rewarding for my staff that have adapted. (not really strange at all.. tbh)
No, I'm saying that "small and mid-sized businesses" tend to be the companies without dedicated IT personnel, or under-utilized IT personnel: companies who could get by with "half" a full-time employee, or some other fraction of an FTE where a fraction of an FTE still represents a significant part of their IT expenditure.
And despite your pedantry, the point still stands. The paper under discussion talks about *small and mid-size* businesses taking advantage of cloud services being the driver for this growth. Not the large organizations that are running huge IT departments and who would have to outsource more-or-less as-is to a service provider because of that immense size.
..... trade secrets to the highest bidder.
There is NOTHING secure about Google mail. What ever is sent to Google is automatically scanned and mined for info they can sell.
Using Google Mail for personal usage is one thing. Using it for ANYTHING that can be considered company trade secret is just plain stupid.
Dear Lord. What pedantry?
Words have meaning. The expression "small and mid-sized business" as you intend to mean it are NOT the "small and medium sized business" as defined by the SBA. The SBA gets to set the definition not me, you, or anyone else, except perhaps for the purpose casual discussion between two people who a priori agree on the meanings of the words they use.
I'll help you out here. The point you're trying to make is that the type of businesses without dedicated IT personnel (ranging in size from SOHO up to possibly the lower end of small businesses), will get by with fewer IT personnel. No argument there.
The point the article was making, however similar, concerned itself with business typically much larger than what you're thinking of. Those business are referred to "small businesses" by the SBA, economists, and interested third-parties. And they do not include SOHO operations.
The pedantry of fixating on some SBA definition in an attempt to show that "small and mid-size businesses" don't include the types of companies I'm talking about, when by your own defintion, which you apparently cannot or did not read, they're expressly included.
Emphasis mine. Please note that these standards describe the *maximum size*, which means they include businesses "up to" the stated employee / annual receipts limit. I'm well aware of the definition the SBA uses.
I'm also well aware - as you seem not to be - that "Annual receipts of 7, 25, all the way up to 33.5 million per year" is not a particularly large company, as employee numbers go. What sort of headcount do you imagine the average software shop with 10-20 million per year in annual receipts has? And how many IT people would you actually need to support the *perhaps* couple dozen people working there?
Why most of the stories starting with "Did you hear about the study from Microsoft..." usually ends with "Not so fast" or "Don't believe the hype"? Not a flamebait. Just an observation.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
It actually is the goal, but society kind of failed the majority of the world in the process. 100 years ago the prediction was we'll reduce the labor and then everyone will work shorter work days, if 100 years ago they knew the grade of technology they probably would have expected everyone to be working 6 hour work days for roughly the same equivelent payscale that was back then, rather than having unemployment edging towards 10%.
The IT monkeys will still be around and needed to keep your PC running, it's the actual skilled IT that will be losing work.
Glad to know my job as a service tech can be reduced to "Monkey". Thanks for that.
Imagine a company using, say, YouTube to post their internal instructional videos. Great idea!
Then, a competitor starts using your instructional videos too. I guess that's cool, it's the Internet, sharing is good etc. (mild frown)
Another competitor thinks they could get a touch more mind share if you didn't look that good online, and issues a bogus DMCA take-down on your site. All gone. Fire the IT guy responsible for security!
Oh, hang on, we did...
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Strangely the USA seems to be geared up for such a system, with a surplus of people it would be a lot more profitable to get rid of the surplus of course you can't just shoot them, although getting the fittest of them to enlist so other people can shoot them is a fairly profitable option.
You can limit access to health care and avoid prolonged care of the sick and disabled and increase natural wastage that way too. You might need to engineer a few situations to increase the death rate of the surplus but by allowing food to be produced with dangerous additives without any oversight, the FDA seems to be powerless or reluctant to inform people about what they are eating...
Ever noticed that death and retirement tend to coincide, people are living longer which is probably why there is an upward trend to the age of retirement which reduces the burden on the productive members of society.
This has largely written in jest, it is unthinkable that there could be any policy to remove the unproductive from the food chain isn't it? However it is a problem that by automating production you need less people and if there are no jobs for them to switch too just what can be done to reduce the financial burden of carrying all these unproductive people?
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Luddite fallacy. Accomplishing the same tasks with less labor means that the cost of the task will fall, and consumers will have more money to spend in other things, which will increase demand and job creation in these areas.
In the case of skilled IT workers, I very much doubt that the cloud is going to make them unable to work. Computers are not outdated technology that is being phased out. There will be new fields and needs in the industry.
I'm the farthest thing from a luddite. I love technology. Aren't we eventually going to hit a point where machines will take over almost anything we can do?
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
The workforce will have to move to move around the sectors again like it did before. It moved away from agriculture, it moved away from manufacturing and it will move away from traditional IT roles as well (though I think IT will simply move to new areas). There's still plenty of space for the workforce - for instance in healthcare, infrastructure or in renewable resources.
But it already demonstrably is progress. The thought of being able to run hundreds of virtual machines for pennies each an hour was unthinkable 10 years ago. Not to mention practically-unlimited storage for next to nothing, with edge locations around the world. The cloud has clearly changed the way many businesses and people use computers and the internet in general. I find it strange you've not noticed that.
Ever heard of the lump of labour fallacy - this is one of those. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
Isn't that what progress is supposed to be about: accomplishing the same tasks with less labor?
It's only progress if the reduction in labour is accompanied by an increase in unemployment benefit paid for out of the owners'' increased profits. Otherwise it's just further regression back to laissez faire capitalism and inequality.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The bad thing about these kinds of situations is that you usually wind up having some middle class hero come in to wave a banner of ultimate sellout by endorsing the loss of thousands of jobs just because he was apparently the fittest in his little section of economic nature that ironed his wrinkles out to earn him or her their supposed 6-figure salary they now make from home...
The worst enemy to the dumb asses that work in IT isn't some manager, some Kafkaesque economic phase, or foreigners... It's themselves. They sell out each other, underbid their ilk just to get that extra amount of tiny business, and weaken their knuckles when being asked for quotes in front of clientele.
The best way to be in this field is by going into business for yourself. I know it's not easy, but it's the truth. It's the only real surefire way to have total control over every determining factor your job revolves around.
It's still unthinkable. Practically-unlimited storage for most people is still 200MB of documents and 2G of movies/pictures. Also, most servers for small companies are barely used.
Go look when you need a petabyte of cloud storage and a cluster of computers to keep your business running and see how much more the cloud is going to cost you. The thing is that Amazon or whoever you pay still needs to manage the same hardware and pay the same number of employees to keep the same amount of hardware running but now they also need to make a profit and customer care overhead, billing overhead etc.
Hosted systems and shared hosting have always been a better choice for small companies (those that have the option not to have a dedicated IT person) but once you have to hire someone to manage them and maybe get a couple of servers, the advantage disappears quickly and the cloud won't change the money. If your company is large enough to have an IT department and that company can actually save money by outsourcing their IT needs, maybe the IT department itself is very badly managed.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Not if the benefits and profits of that mostly go to the few(er and fewer).
Rich people spend their money.
No they don't; that is why they are rich. Investing your money in financial instruments that only exist as concepts does not spread the wealth; it only accrues it.
http://sandboxx.org/file/3687/
The thought of being able to run hundreds of virtual machines for pennies each an hour was unthinkable 10 years ago.
I've worked with ops that ran thousands of real boxes maintained by one or two people.
"Cloud" is stupid, just considering backing up existing data. It may be cheap/inexpensive, so attractive to pointy haired bosses, but it's still foolish. If your data is valuable, that's the worst way you should be treating it.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Maybe. Maybe some progress is bad.
> I find it strange for MS to do an about-face and claim cloud as an actual replacement for a proper in-house IT.
It isn't an 'about face' at all. In-house IT will still be needed, unless the cloud contract includes contractors' staff to be available to do that (at 3 times the cost of in-house).
What is _not_ an about face is that Microsoft wants to regain control over all computing. In the 90s MS had almost all market share. Most consultants and resellers pushed MS products, almost all competitors were marginalised.
More recently there have been threats to this monopoly: Apple in the workplace, In-house IT staff installing Linux servers, businesses still running XP, Android phones.
In order to bring back the proper functioning of the world MS must reduce the power of the in-house IT and provide a new way to lock-in the businesses and ensure that they keep up to date with their payments for upgrades. The cloud provides all this. Once a company's data and/or services are in a cloud (and this must be a MS one) then the Linux loving IT staff can be fired, all computers must be upgraded to Windows 8 (for the best user experience), phones must be WP7 or WP8, iPads won't work, Androids will explode.
The 1.1 trillion increase in revenue will all be Microsoft's.
For Cloud crap, most of them forget the single biggest factor: their internet connection.
You're not going to be doing much Cloud work on a 10Mbit connection, or even a 50Mbit connection with 5+ users. That will be quickly choked with concurrent MAPI connections, web browsing, and whatever else they've got going on. File transfers would damn the thing quickly...
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Cloud solutions are generic and mimic generic products(such as a speadsheet or word processor) and storage already installed locally on most computers. They do not provide customized solutions for optimized business processes and will not for some time. Jobs safe :P
Or they could find a different, more enjoyable way to make money. But soylent green works too.
Heh, my last two companies (~15 person startup and ~200 person tech company) have had something like 2 physical servers between them. Everything else in the cloud. SMB should be in the cloud, because Amazon/Rackspace/etc will be better than any sysadmins that they could otherwise afford. The only orgs that really should be running their own datacenters are the guys that 1) could do better or 2) need to do so for specific privacy/governance/regulatory reasons.
I may be slightly old fashioned but I hope the whole cloud thing doesn't end up being just another marketing thing. I do use some cloud based services myself (such as www.qooshi.com and www.mailchimp.com), basically hosted and accessible from anywhere BUT none of these sites actually brand themselves as cloud services. On the other hand, I do see companies that use the word cloud the most are actually the ones that would probably fall into the category the least. My concern is, it is being used as a marketing exercise.
The expansion of could services and/or other online services in general has led to the expansion of the operations center I work in (a microsoft ops center, to be a little more precise but won't say which one (there are many)) which resulted in me getting hired to work there. Now, I certainly don't see millions of people working in this operations center, or all of them combined that I'm privy to know about, but I'd like to think that some jobs have resulted from online services. I don't see how they'd come up with millions though. All this online stuff will do is result in a few thousand new jobs, at most, but result in the loss of more on the client end as IT people are let go since they're no longer needed. It's a resources re-balancing act.