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."

Comments

Sounds good

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds great. Less of the annoying IT monkeys and happier staff who can finally get their work done. Win all around.

Re:Sounds good

[jaymz666]

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.

Re:Sounds good

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Sounds good

[jaymz666]

Because those jobs will be concentrated in fewer service provider centers, requiring fewer people to manage them.

Re:Sounds good

[BitterOak]

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?

Re:Sounds good

[jaymz666]

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.

Re:Sounds good

[vlm]

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.

Re:Sounds good

[TheNinjaroach]

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.

Re:Sounds good

[tqk]

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.

Re:Sounds good

[Fluffeh]

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".

Re:Sounds good

[zlives]

VDI deployments... all you need is your iPAD

Re:Sounds good

[JDG1980]

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.

Re:Sounds good

[Americano]

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.

Re:Sounds good

[CAIMLAS]

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...

Re:Sounds good

[Ihmhi]

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.

Re:Sounds good

[value_added]

Small & mid-size. You know, the types of businesses that don't have dedicated IT departments, or who have ...

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.

Re:Sounds good

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Sounds good

[Mitreya]

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).

Re:Sounds good

[shutdown -p now]

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.

Re:Sounds good

[icebike]

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.

Re:Sounds good

[zootie]

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.

Re:Sounds good

[Americano]

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.

Re:Sounds good

[value_added]

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.

Re:Sounds good

[Americano]

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.

Size guidelines define the maximum size that a firm (including its affiliates) may be to qualify as a small business for most SBA programs.

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?

Re:Sounds good

[Riceballsan]

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%.

Re:Sounds good

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Sounds good

[blackest_k]

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?

Re:Sounds good

[diegocg]

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.

Re:Sounds good

[Ihmhi]

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?

Re:Sounds good

[wienerschnizzel]

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.

Re:Sounds good

[dave420]

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.

Re:Sounds good

[tehcyder]

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.

Re:Sounds good

[guruevi]

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.

Re:Sounds good

[Johann Lau]

Not if the benefits and profits of that mostly go to the few(er and fewer).

Re:Sounds good

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Sounds good

[tqk]

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.

Re:Sounds good

[EvilBudMan]

Maybe. Maybe some progress is bad.

Re:Sounds good

[CAIMLAS]

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...

Re:Sounds good

[s0nicfreak]

Or they could find a different, more enjoyable way to make money. But soylent green works too.

Re:Sounds good

[PintoPiman]

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.

horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[Surt]

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.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

Like pumping gas, for example...

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[jdastrup]

Except the "cloud" is not new technology. It's just a fancy marketing word for outsourcing. Skilled IT workers will move from in-house employees to working for the cloud providers. No new jobs at all, possibly even less, if the economy of scale is factored in.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[elrous0]

Yeah, I saw a bunch of freed people in front of the unemployment office just the other day. Thought about stopping to tell them how lucky they are, but they looked kind of angry.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[Mitreya]

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.

I don't know if anyone (except RIAA) is arguing against that. But I am sick and tired of them claiming that this is done to improve economy and that they are gonna save lots of money and hire lots of people. That part is bullshit -- they are going to sit on the money and maybe hand out small dividents. If they needed "core" hires, they would have already made these hires. Few companies are making hiring decisions based on whether they currently have any cash available.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[Americano]

In fairness, pumping gas *is* moderately more pleasant than shoveling horse manure.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

Come back on the first of the month when they get their food stamps and 40s of malt liquor.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[Austerity Empowers]

The "cloud" has always been about having fewer IT staff, period. Anywhere in the world. It's not, in this case, about firing people but about doing more with less. This is probably progress.

The fact that what staff does exist would likely be in a low cost region is an entirely different process, which happens to be the work of pure Evil, or Wall Street, but I'm being redundant.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[MattBD]

Agreed in principle, but that's not how it tends to pan out in practice. It does seem like there's going to be less and less jobs available in the future, but what are we doing? Harangueing the unemployed ever harder to get jobs. Years ago futurists were predicting that increasing automation would mean workers would be working less hours, and some were even predicting the possibility of a basic minimum income that people could choose to supplement by working. What actually happened is companies just had fewer workers doing the same amount of work. Unless something changes, we may well wind up with more and more workers chasing fewer and fewer jobs.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[scamper_22]

That is only true if society is allowed to adjust to the new conditions.

Yes, being more efficient means, we should be able to use that human capital to engage in new industries or reduce the work in current industries.

For example, lets say the cloud is amazing and we end up with huge numbers of unemployed IT workers. Theoretically, we should be able to take these workers and do one of two things

1. We reduce the work load in existing jobs. So for example, we end up with more teachers, lawyers, nurses, accountants... and the workload in those industries drops. We might end up with people working only 20 hours a week in such cases as the current jobs are redistributed. Wonderful stuff. That is how we've been able to achieve more leisure time.

2. The new labor is allocated to new fields. So maybe these unemployed IT workers become solar panel designers or something.

Things are always the same... until they're different
.
I believe 2 is much less likely to be a driver of mass jobs. While we will most certainly have more inventions and new fields, they will likely not be mass employers. Most likely, they will employ a few highly skilled designers. Anything else will be highly automated. I don't for example think the green revolution will generate the kinds of jobs we used to see in the old industrial age.

So we're left with 1. The problem is our society will not let this happen. For one, everyone is scared of deflation... and well... reduced work hours might very well mean less money in each person's pocket... so deflation. Special interests also hate egalitarianism. How would lawyers or doctors or public sector workers feel, if they earned no more than the average person? They are used to earning more than the average person. So they are unlikely to want to give up their position of privilege.

So while theoretically, society is always better off via efficiency, I wouldn't be so quick to simply dismiss concerns.

We do not live in any kind of a free market where such things can self-adjust.

More than likely, we'll see the special interests continue to try and hold onto their positions of privilege and refuse to redistribute the workload to their fellow citizens. This results in mass unemployment while the special interests cling to power. They also won't accept levels of taxation that would allow the government to redistribute work to everyone.

Hey, isn't this happening in Europe as we speak?
Not to mention the huge unemployment in the US.

It's great to talk about the benefits of the free market. But you should realize we don't live in one... and the results can be catastrophic if you simply apply free market ideas to systems which have little to do with a free market.

While you dismiss everything and say society should advance... I certainly don't see it as a positive thing if society starts having mass unemployment or plunging into mass deficits collapsing economies and social unrest.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[tqk]

In fairness, pumping gas *is* moderately more pleasant than shoveling horse manure.

No it's not. Pumping gas involves cars, fumes, customers, gas pumps, managers, bad hours, scraping windshields, and weather (possibly even snow shovelling). Scooping manure is considerably simpler. Some people even prefer the aroma of manure to that of petroleum distillates (count me in there).

On the other hand, fresh cow pies are disgusting.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

If everyone is so focused on productive tasks, what is being produced and for who? In the 19th century, the average work week for a laborer was 100 hours, and with 19th century mentalities and coal power (and lots of social change) the work week gradually went down to 50 hours by the start of the 20th century.

Can you explain why we weren't able, with 20th century technology and oil energy, to reduce that further? Should everyone now sit in front of a computer and "produce content"? Evolution hasn't caught up with that yet, I'm fairly confident I'd be happier doing something else. With all our resources and so many "productive" people, well, where is it?

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

The people who do still have jobs will have more disposable income and will spend more on things that would have normally gone to business costs. As a result, more money will flow into things like movies, concerts, and antique collectors pubic wigs. People in those industries will benefit and will want to hire more people as a result. That or they can join all the typewriter assembly technicians who refused to learn any other skills.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[PCM2]

I'm not sure if this is the point you were trying to make, but in my lifetime, there were jobs pumping gas. They went away, and now we all just have to pump our own gas.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[King_TJ]

This is true, if and when we're talking about changes that are true advances. With cloud computing, I'd say the jury's still out.

Among other things, the data security issues really haven't been adequately addressed. If a cloud provider upgrades their old equipment, what guarantee do you have that they really did a secure wipe of the drives in the old systems before reselling them or scrapping them? What happens if someone hacks into one of these services and gets ahold of your data? Will you even know it happened? How many people have the opportunity to get their hands on your personal data who aren't even your own employees or hired consultants you interact with directly?

There's also a real question about outages being handled in a timely manner. Theoretically, the professionals using high-end gear at these data centers (hopefully with redundancy) can do a better job at keeping your data online than you can as a small or mid-sized business running everything yourself. BUT, the catch is, when they have an outage, they've got hundreds (even thousands?) of pissed off users, ALL of whom think their data is the most important to get back online. Meanwhile, these guys only make relative peanuts from you in monthly hosting fees so unlike your own employees, they won't have the vested interest in getting you running again.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[AK Marc]

The "cloud" has always been about marketing speak to separate people from their money.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[AmiMoJo]

It only takes being burned a few times for most companies to realize that outsourcing is a bad idea. When the system is down, you are losing money, staff can't work, your customers are screaming at you... that is when you want some hapless it staff close by.

Close enough to stand behing them screaming until they fix it. Phoning it in just isn't the same.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, trickle down economics. That's been working marvellously well, hasn't it?

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[Cat_Herder_GoatRoper]

The Mailman and the Paperboy have to be eliminated first!

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah.... like sacking potatoes.

People have a mind and body. That's what really sucks about American attitudes towards jobs. There are physical jobs that require skill and aptitude. I am sick of technology dumbing down trades to the point that any monkey could do the job with a little training. What jobs get respect that are physical, other than sports-stars.

Are people happier or more healthy by having either a mental job or physical, and not a combination of both?

As for IT will always be needed? I think not. Really... with operating sytems allowing secure connections and local mass storage and backup being so easy. If I had a small company, I could justify throwing away a 350$ computer just because the secretary messed up her Word settings. .02

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure if this is the point you were trying to make, but in my lifetime, there were jobs pumping gas. They went away, and now we all just have to pump our own gas.

Obviously you don't live in Oregon or New Jersey...

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[Cat_Herder_GoatRoper]

I have already done this once. During the late 80's I repaired electronics. After noting that I would no longer be paid for that skill I learned another. Now I work with SAN mostly Dell and HP stuff, but now I am learning EMC Symmetrix VMAX. Hopefully, I will be able to just keep up with the storage technology and not have to make another significant career change.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[s.petry]

Such a simple metaphor does not explain an economy. We have gone from dumb to dumber, and Microsoft is posing more of the same. We as a society have given away not only all of our ideas, but the source code and blue prints so that other people can build it. Did we do so for the betterment of society? Hell no, we did it to make a whole lot of short term profit at the expense of society.

All of these "Cloud" cheer leaders are great, if you don't think about anything but a bottom line.

Did we learn nothing from the collapse of the big 3? Obviously not, at least if people like you make the decisions. Thankfully, people like you are rare.

Does that mean we can not advance? Not by a long shot. We know that "Cloud" is great for some things, but horrible for others. We should be choosing what we put in "Cloud" very carefully. Advancing cloud technology but also home grown technology. One being viable does not mean that the other is not viable. Both can, and should, be expanded and grown.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[tqk]

Except the "cloud" is not new technology. It's just a fancy marketing word for outsourcing.

No, that's just the latest implementation. Go back further. Think glass walled rooms, mainframes, priests in white lab coats, ...

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, my pee is trickling down on you as I write this.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[gutnor]

That is nice to see that written in history books. When you are contemporary with the events, that is a lot less fun. Go have a look how all those ex-manufacturing heavy region of the US or Europe and see how outsourcing is improving the world quality of life and economy. Go back in time and explain to the native american how, from their death, one of the greatest nation on earth will rise.

The interesting bit is how we will deal with the collateral damage, because, let's be honest, the IT guy that will lose his job will not qualify for the new positions. Worse, the new jobs will be lagging a few years after the "erased jobs". So for a few years there will be some poor IT people stuck between fighting everyday to keep their job in a shrinking market and at simultaneously cross-training to be competitive in another market. (because you know low/no qualification jobs have been "erased" already)

So yeah, society advance, that is a good thing. However, I don't think we have advanced enough to have a better answer to them than "tough luck, suck to be you", and that is not a good thing !

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[tqk]

If everyone is so focused on productive tasks, what is being produced and for who? In the 19th century, the average work week for a laborer was 100 hours, and with 19th century mentalities and coal power (and lots of social change) the work week gradually went down to 50 hours by the start of the 20th century.

Can you explain why we weren't able, with 20th century technology and oil energy, to reduce that further? Should everyone now sit in front of a computer and "produce content"? Evolution hasn't caught up with that yet, I'm fairly confident I'd be happier doing something else. With all our resources and so many "productive" people, well, where is it?

On my last big gig with a "vicious multi-national", ...

It took them twelve years to finally bite the bullet and drag someone like me in to fix a critical problem, something their people had been working around (and were afraid to touch for fear of breaking it) for more than a decade, and which was producing corrupt data all that time.

Sucks to be human and have to rely on other humans. Sometimes, we are barely more advanced than mud guppies. THAT's the human condition!

And I for one hate it.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[turbidostato]

"Among other things, the data security issues really haven't been adequately addressed.

It's about perception. The only real problem that remains is one that is neither new nor unknown about how to manage: service outsourcing.

"If a cloud provider upgrades their old equipment, what guarantee do you have that they really did a secure wipe"

If your bank upgrades his old equipment, what guarantee do you have that it really did a secure wipe? If *you* upgrade your old equipment, what guarantee do you have that your minions really did a secure wipe? Answer in all cases: the money you threw at it.

"What happens if someone hacks into one of these services and gets ahold of your data?"

What happens if someone hacks into your bank's services and gets ahold of its data? What happens if someone hacks into one of your services and gets ahold of your data? How the subject in any of those cases makes the answer any different?

"There's also a real question about outages being handled in a timely manner."

Yeah... which is managed exactly the same way you yourself do it or your bank does it.

"BUT, the catch is, when they have an outage, they've got hundreds (even thousands?) of pissed off users"

And you think that's a catch? It might be as well the strongest incentive for a) avoid that happening and b) restore service as fast as possible.

"Meanwhile, these guys only make relative peanuts from you"

Meanwhile, due to their high profile, any serious incident can take out *a lot* of money *really* quickly (not exactly a SaaS company, but remember what happened to Netflix when they announced their billing changes).

All in all there's nothing new to see here: there are good service providers and there are bad service providers. Even more, what's good enough for some people is not for others, so one people wants to pay some numbers, at a certain service level while others will pay more for a higher service.

Services "in the cloud" are not any different from the business point of view to any other service provider, and you already use a lot of them on a daily basis, even for critical (as in life threatening) services. Why should you want to own and manage your own compute resources any more or any less than to own and manage your own cutlery mill, your own oil refinery or your own electrical substation?

Except, of course, in the minds of unimaginative people unable to see *any* kind of change for its own value.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

Not when you travel to fucking New Jersey. They wont let you pump your gas.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[martin-boundary]

So while theoretically, society is always better off via efficiency, I wouldn't be so quick to simply dismiss concerns.

Not even theoretically. Economic efficiency has no relation to happiness, nor does it try to accomodate it in any way.

Let's say in the best of all possible worlds that all these IT workers find jobs and become nurses and teachers. They'll get paid, but will they be happy? IT workers tend to like computers. Improving efficiency in this case would decrease substantially their happiness.

Efficiency is increased by forcing people to do things that there is demand for, as opposed to doing things that they actually enjoy. It's a fallacy to assume that society is better off by increasing efficiency, and while it could in principle go either way in particular cases, the much higher stress levels in modern societies suggest that in fact, increased efficiency makes societies worse off.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[Nikker]

It is a double edged sword. Thin clients and SAS will cut out lots of jobs and lead to companies restructuring. Now they will be finally prepared for today's market. Then they realize everyone will be setting up shop competing with them and they will have to trim down even further. With all these IT guys out of work that will add up to quite a bit of money not being earned and of course a scarcity of money available for them to make.

Let's face it once SAS goes mainstream anyone with a couple bucks will be able to set up shop offering the same service as you with out having to pile all that cash into writing and maturing their software that took "your" company years and likely millions to get going. Your clever and efficient software and most of your departments will be replaced by Clippy and your multimillion dollar annual company will be bringing home as much if not a bit less than the workers you just let go.

The business owners of today will have to own and operate multiple businesses to make the same money they are making today. Realistically the main thing most business have over everyone else is the high entry into market and what makes that number so high? Computers, tech staff and consultants that talk in tongues. With all of that gone what really makes it so difficult to manage a business?

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

That that that that that that means squat...

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

Come again?

So you advocate not allowing natural efficiencies to come about so that more total money continues to go into IT and people who like computers can continue to be happy?

I happen to like playing computer games all day. Perhaps we should set up a national foundation to make sure lots of money goes to games players, thereby increasing happiness and benefiting society.

Also, go and read about the "broken window fallacy" to discover an excellent way of creating wealth.

GP was right on the money. In general, "creating jobs" can be good or bad. The real aim is increasing efficiency and quality of life long term without causing too much damage in the short term.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not about benefits to society, free market, efficiency or advancement. It is not about special interests and redistribution of workload. This is evolution. It will happen and it doesn't give a fuck whether it benefits society, fucks it, cures hunger and disease or reintroduces a plague. And you're a moron if you think anyone is going to control evolution.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[martin-boundary]

So you advocate not allowing natural efficiencies to come about so that more total money continues to go into IT and people who like computers can continue to be happy?

I like how you slipped the word natural in there, to make efficiencies (another nice word, who wouldn't want to be efficient?) more desirable. If it's natural, then it must be right. Perhaps you can make an oblique reference to God or the invisible hand of the market, while you're at it?

GP was right on the money. In general, "creating jobs" can be good or bad. The real aim is increasing efficiency and quality of life long term without causing too much damage in the short term.

Except that efficiency and quality of life aren't fully correlated, and not at all in some cases. Yes creating jobs can be good or bad, and yes increasing quality of life is a great aim. What isn't a great aim is ignoring quality of life and going for efficiency instead, while claiming the two are magically inseparable.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[zootie]

MS is just jumping on the bandwagon. Windows is perceived as "cloud late", so it is fighting the perception.

The Cloud concepts can useful tools in the IT arsenal. But we have to remember that not everything is a nail, and right now we're still in the phase where managers thing that their cloud hammer is good for everything.

Cloud services make a lot of sense for retail and some manufacturing and store fronts. It makes no sense for specialized service and office workers. Trying to use it for everything is the proverbial square peg into the round hole. Users haven't realized the discrepancy yet. The question is, how long it will be before they begin the reaction and correction?

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[zootie]

That's the competitive advantage that business are giving up when they replace their local, hard earned and paid for local systems in favor of the new and shiny Cloud.

Then companies become shells, that are geared towards sales. The only thing these business will do is figure out ways to sale the re-branded generic products.

As customers realize that most providers are pretty much the same, there will be more and more pressure to lower prices, and will force these same business to figure out ways to be competitive (cheaper and distinctive). Some will figure out ways to combine cloud offerings and/or their own proprietary tech, and might come up with new distinctive offerings. Most will be bypassed and the market will consolidate (ie, going out of business, since the only one doing the work is the Cloud provider).

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

Cleaning up road apples was an entry level job. You could go get a job pumping gas when the horses went away.

Today is different. Pumping gas as an entry level job is not being replaced with anything entry level.

Welcome to the future. There are no silver jumpsuits and the first rung on the career ladder is ten feet in the air.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[FoolishOwl]

True. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of a newly emergent industry for IT workers to move into.

Also, it'd be kind of nice if increased productivity, at some point, improved lives, through rising wages and reduced working hours, meaning more leisure time at the same income levels.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[FoolishOwl]

Indeed. As manure goes, horse manure is relatively pleasant. It's basically mulch, and smells like plant matter, and I find the smell much less irritating than that of gasoline fumes. It does tend to stain your clothes, though.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[emilper]

Let's face it once SAS goes mainstream anyone with a couple bucks will be able to set up shop offering the same service as you with out having to pile all that cash into writing and maturing their software that took "your" company years and likely millions to get going.

I should be rolling on the floor laughing, but I'm just doing support for some SAS solution right now ... fortunately I have written my own custom tools to automate most of the fixes and 99% of the time I have only to choose which button to click.

No SAS services will give you the same service as your own custom designed e-shop. Custom solutions would be too expensive for a 100 items shop, but larger companies would need to write their own e-shop software, or at least contract somebody else to write custom software.

Computers, tech staff and consultants that talk in tongues.

yeas, eveel mean tech staff :) ... until your SAS shop stops scaling or you have to hire back a tongues speaking IT wizard to process the dumb reports and give you the info you need, or you want to add vouchers for "the FSM day" etc.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[dave420]

No, it's not a fancy marketing word for outsourcing. Seriously, get a grip. That is being deliberately obtuse.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[dave420]

How is having a room full of mainframes even similar to having datacenters full of cheap machines all being shared by different companies around the world, all communicating over thousands of miles to millions of customers? Now people don't need their own mainframes, and can dynamically scale up or down the number of computers they use, all for cents. Yes, you have a box connected with wires to a larger box you don't see, but that's about as far as the similarity goes and to pretend any differently is being intellectually dishonest. Mainframes are awesome, but don't let your apparent hard-on for them cloud your judgement.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[dave420]

No it hasn't. Clearly you are not someone who's used the cloud for large projects where it beats, hands down, any non-cloud solution. I can't believe I'm having to explain this to someone I presume isn't a jaded toddler.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

See also E.F. Schumacher on Buddhist Economics for support for your point.
http://web.archive.org/web/20110425153540/http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html

Also, look at stuff on a "basic income":
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html

And stuff by Martin Ford and Marshall Brain.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

Read about a "basic income" , a "gift economy", a "planned economy", and "local subsistence" for ideas about alternative ways of organizing economies. A whole book on that:
"The dictionary of alternatives: utopianism and organization"
http://books.google.com/books?id=IKZVKMPEQCEC

Other ideas:
http://www.altruists.org/ideas/society/abundance_or_scarcity/
"The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking. (Martin Luther King, Jr. (1967))"

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[jsepeta]

Did you (the jaded toddler) recall when Azure went down last week, taking all of Microsoft's clients' cloud systems with it? because of a Leap Day bug?

our non-cloud LAN infrastructure worked just fine, BTW. no need to outsource when local data sources provide more security, speed, and uptime.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[tqk]

It does tend to stain your clothes, though.

The girl that cares that my jeans are stained is not a girl that I care about. Take 'em off and the problem's solved.

While the world sleeps, Canadians shovel snow. :-| 0530h.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

I love the Cloud marketing pitch that cloud computing is so dramatically inexpensive.

It's probably very inexpensive if your needs are minimal. When you have robust, power & data consumption hungry applications that require substantial CPU and disk IO time, the calculations become much more difficult to compare apples to apples. And the fantasy land version of scaling up and down on demand works really well if you have a minimal data sets, or if latency is not that important. For applications with large datasets that are not well suited to various block-storage mechanisms (S3, Cloudfiles, etc), there is another whole set of logistics that are involved in determining what type of deal you are getting.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

If businesses were at all interested in spending money on hiring people, the problem would not exist.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

They pump gas somewhere? ... The only place I have seen that is where it was legislated (New Jersey?)

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[tqk]

How is having a room full of mainframes even similar to having datacenters full of cheap machines all being shared by different companies around the world, all communicating over thousands of miles to millions of customers?

Well, one mainframe can run many VMs. Is that what you're asking? Would you rather spend all of your time swapping failed drives and PCI boards? You'd rather maintain a rack of pizza boxes, instead of one big box?

No, I don't have a stiffie for mainframes. The biggest I've ever worked with was minis. However, I'm not a fool.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[s.petry]

Pretty much you and I agree. Where I disagree is that I don't see the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel as to people seeing "cloud" as the solution to everything and not a tool. At least from the executive side. The trend for the last 20 years has been to dump all their eggs in to a single basket. Most IT professional's know the differences and distinctions.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[EvilBudMan]

Depends upon what the climate is like.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[ogdenk]

They eliminated pumping gas as a career path here.... all of our stations are self-serve and are usually staffed by 1-3 people tops including the manager.

Shoveling shit might have sucked but at least the city-dwelling shit shoveler had a couple thousand years of job security.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[AK Marc]

What was the dollar value assigned to the risk analysis? Oh, no risk analysis? That's like comparing the cloud to internal servers and excluding hardware costs in the comparison, as you get to own (and depreciate) hardware, but not services. I'm a jaded CIO, I've played the numbers game to justify anything, and the cloud is great, as long as you assign a $0 figure to risk. But anyone who does that without knowing it's gaming the numbers is incompetent, and that's why the cloud is doing so well. So many people assign a $0 figure to a day (or week or month) of downtime.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[s0nicfreak]

They don't have to work, but are still handed money... I don't know why they are angry. They could always get a dog it if they are just DETERMINED to shovel manure.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[s0nicfreak]

Pumping gas has been replaced with the entry level job of being on-call to handle things when someone loses their credit card and someone else picks it up and buys gas with it, and with using a computer inside the gas station to ring up purchases.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[s0nicfreak]

Teachers and nurses use computers nowadays. A teacher, in fact, could do their job ENTIRELY on computers. If someone goes from IT worker working with computers 40 hours a week to teacher working with computers 20 hours a week with an extra 20 hours to just have fun with computers, I think they would be happier. If they aren't, they can always just do what they like to do without being paid for it - or get an additional job - for those other 20 hours.

Re:horse manure gatherers out of jobs

[s0nicfreak]

I happen to like playing computer games all day. Perhaps we should set up a national foundation to make sure lots of money goes to games players, thereby increasing happiness and benefiting society.

As someone that plays video games for a living, I approve of this...The guy I know making the most from playing games makes nearly $7,000 a month, though - I don't really think a foundation is needed.

If you like playing games, figure out how to make money from it. I don't see why most people consider "job/career" to mean "something shitty that we must aim to make as little depressing as possible."

Sounds great.

[mosb1000]

I can't imagine how anything could be worse than my IT department.

Re:Sounds great.

[Anonymous Coward]

A porno starring your IT department?

Re:Sounds great.

[Lunix Nutcase]

Will it come with extra-strength eye bleach?

Re:Sounds great.

[Anonymous Coward]

A porno involving tranny versions of your IT department?

Re:Sounds great.

[tqk]

I can't imagine how anything could be worse than my IT department.

How about the non-existence of your IT dept? How do you feel about flipping burgers?

Re:Sounds great.

[VortexCortex]

I can't imagine how anything could be worse than my IT department.

Imagine a hardware failure, and instead of waiting 30 minutes for your on site IT staff to replace a hard disk drive, you have to wait for a local independent contractor to arrive, and because they can't be fully trusted as a normal employee it takes them a day or more to get your workstation back online -- For every configuration option and administration access the contractor needs to call the remote IT help desk for the info, thus there's a severe shortage of anyone willing to work in such a frustrating environment, and instead of a day, it takes a week with multiple contractor visits to get everything working properly again.

Yep, I really miss our IT department. Strict as they may have been, at least they could actually fix things in a timely manner.

Well they're "cloud" jobs...

[Kenja]

So one person does around a hundred different jobs as needed.

Re:Well they're "cloud" jobs...

[Penguinisto]

...until the network equipment/connection at Acme SmallBiz Inc. goes 'splat', their cloud goes down for more than a few hours due to some stupid bug, the A/P department goofs a payment or two to the cloud provider causing a disconnection, or Joe Overworked at Cloud, Inc. decides that he can make oodles of money selling some of the juicier trade secrets to the black market, or...

Yeah. Not seeing the Cloud (cue choir music) as the big panacea that all the Cloud retailers present it as.

Oh brother

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Oh brother

[elrous0]

Yeah, but think of all the free time you'll have when you don't have to go to work every day.

Re:Oh brother

[Sarten-X]

The problem is that we still use jobs, income, and money as a means for distributing food, health care, and other things necessary for life. It'd be great if technology meant more free time, but still enough income to support an average quality of life, but that's not yet the case.

Re:Oh brother

[MattBD]

Agreed, but we're going to need some very radical reforms to achieve it. One possibility is for a tax-free minimum income for all adults, which people can choose to supplement through paid employment, and another is for using legislation to reduce people's working hours. Unfortunately I don't see much of the electorate liking either - businesses would probably campaign against reducing working hours, and it's all too easy to imagine a minimum income being painted as encouraging "scroungers".

Re:Oh brother

[CohibaVancouver]

It'd be great if technology meant more free time

It does. Last summer our family lived in an apartment while our house was being renovated. There was no dishwasher. I had never before realized how much time that piece of technology saves. Instead of driving all over town looking for something I can search online now. Instead of driving to the video store I can PPV a movie and on and on... Technology has given us a lot of time back, we just take it all for granted, or 'waste' it watching YouTube videos.

Re:Oh brother

[DigiShaman]

What do you think the whole OWS movement has been about? That's your social change right there. They're out of work and pissed. When a nation is in a state of instability and upheaval, that level of wealth consolidation is simply too unstable. We are, and have been in a major state of "correction" for some time now. And to make matters worse, a lot of the wealth has been flowing overseas instead of being re-invested in our nation. An honest-to-God trickle out of wealth!

We (Americans) are overvalued. Simple as that. We no longer have a monopoly on human capital. We're having to bid for jobs and a salary against the rest of the world willing to do it cheaper. Far cheaper. But that's not really the problem. The problem is the pace in how quickly this is happening. Society and our culture cannot take that shock in change so quickly. Hence, the problem with rapid unemployment that we are seeing now and the angst that follows along with it.

Re:Oh brother

[scarboni888]

That was the line I was sold too. The fact of the matter is that technology has done its' part: it increased productivity tremendously. However what the people who were trying to tell me about this magnificent future I should expect to find while i was growing up is that you can never underestimate the OTHER guys GREED!

So it goes like this: A new technological invention allows workers A & B to do the same amount of work in half the time. Fire worker B and worker A still works the same amount of time doing twice as much work.

Or this: a new technology enables a certain sector to do the same amount of work with only a 3 day work week. However GREED means that the OTHER guy will make its' workers work 5 days a week in order to outcompete you who thought it was all about 'free time'.

Really though, it's about GREED.

Re:Oh brother

[PCM2]

However what the people who were trying to tell me about this magnificent future I should expect to find while i was growing up is that you can never underestimate the OTHER guys GREED!

You grew up in Miami in the early 80s?

Re:Oh brother

[Anonymous Coward]

When are we going to accept that technology SHOULD be used to eliminate jobs and create more free time for more people?

As soon as we get replicator technology with an inexhaustible power source.

Once that happens, free time will be awesome. Until then, free time is a fucking nightmare. Ask anyone who can't get a full time job that pays above the real (versus the government's hilariously bad idea of) poverty line.

Re:Oh brother

[Ihmhi]

Aside from the dearth of free-to-play and cheap games that I could spend a lifetime playing, I have the Internet at my fingertips. I can literally learn to do nearly anything and read up on any subject I would want to. I practically have Memory Alpha at my fingertips. What reason (aside from socialization and exercise) would I ever want to leave my home if I had the option not to?

Re:Oh brother

[elrous0]

would I ever want to leave my home if I had the option not to?

With a generous benefactor paying all your bills, why would you ever need to?

Re:Oh brother

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly for your argument, you've ignored the entire point the GP was making by focussing on part of a sentence. It's a fairly juvenile form of argument.

What makes it so entirely juvenile, in this case, is that the GP actually said what he meant: that work generates income, which is used to buy food and shelter. The thread originator even acknowledged this, calling it a social problem.

Re:Oh brother

[turbidostato]

"businesses would probably campaign against reducing working hours"

And they would do for a good reason.

Capitalism as a social tool is based on the premise that each one's egotism somehow drives global social benefit. And the basic tool to achieve that is parallelizing the pursue of global comfort by making each one, driven by his own egotism, responsible for his own share of it.

And the problems of capitalism are therefore obvious: the "somehow" and the local optimum problem.

In the last decades we saw a false globalization arising, and I say "false" because it was a globalization of the financial sources but not of the people access to wealth -which is an obviety since while electronic money might move around at the speed of light, people do not and won't be able to do in the foreseeble future, which in turn introduces a inequality between people and finances, as the last crisis has clearly shown.

So, returning to the topic, how in hell would any company -or any country for that matter, introduce a reduced labour day when other companies/countries do not? We already see what happens when a country (say, China) has a longer workday with lower wages: in a globalized world, man labour rush there while only the people that financially controls the output of that labour stay here -remember that money flows easily than people, and even that, just for a while.

Yes, *theoretically*, with enough time, wages will rise in those countries so eventually the world will become "flat" again, unless:
a) No other other countries rise to be lower wages to occupy the niche, which would mean other countries are in turn going poorer and poorer more or less in the fashion of a human wave in a sports stadium.
b) Again due to the fact the money flows easier than people the world becomes a place where instead of rich countries and poor countries there is a worlwide elite of rich people and a mass of servant ones with a kind of a concrete wall between them (remember, right now 93% of the wealth of USA is in the hands of 1% of the people)
c) Even if everything went perfectly for world society and in the end the world becomes a paradise, it won't be in a lot of years and, as Keynes stated, well, yeah, but in a lot of years will all be dead -and in the meantime it is going to be a living hell.

Re:Oh brother

[Anonymous Coward]

Reducing work hours sucks, if you mean the obvious step of s/40/35/g on FLSA. In 50 years, that leaves you in the same exact fix, and you have to fight all over again to drop it to 30.

First thing, convert from the discontinuous 1x/1.5x multiplier to a smooth function, maybe exponential. Make sure there's a multiplicative parameter on hours worked.

Second, connect that parameter to unemployment -- now when work gets scarcer, it ramps up the economic pressure to cut hours rather than employees.

Re:Oh brother

[zootie]

I think of current globalization as -nearly- a return of slavery. Right now, outsourcing to India and China seems cheaper than automation because the initial investment is low. Even if in the long term automation within USA and EU for their markets would be cheaper and lead to sustained growth and better quality: business tend to only make short term decisions and won't even consider automation.

It is also reminiscent of the aborted Rome/Greece industrial age (No Industrial Revolution in Ancient Greece?): it was cheaper to keep slaves than to invest in building machines that would work using steam power. Right now, even though we have the technology, it is considered a good business practice to outsource labor to low tech markets because their startup cost is low, and there is no regard for quality and long term viability.

Re:Oh brother

[Anonymous Coward]

>> I can literally learn to do nearly anything

Nope - you can learn to do many, many things. But you have limits. Perhaps you don't like dealing with people - then you can't actually learn to be a highly successful salesperson.

Re:Oh brother

[Anonymous Coward]

So you will be paying for these laptops, tablets and smartphones along with the internet connection to play these games with the money you get from your government check? Maybe paying for food, housing and whatnot with this check? JUst because you read something doesn't mean someone will LET you do it. You can read about heart surgery but NO ONE will pay you to do it.

You .. are a moron.

Re:Oh brother

[Anonymous Coward]

would I ever want to leave my home if I had the option not to?

With a generous benefactor paying all your bills, why would you ever need to?

Because of freedom. Generous benefactor paying your bills so you never need to (nor can) leave the place you live in - It is called prison, and everybody in it want to get out of it. If you were given choice of all your bills payed but under condition that you must not work, how long you think you, or for that matter any person, would endure before falling into clinical depression? AFAIK, prison labor is not forced (at least not in all prisons), but most inmates still opt to work wherever it's possible.

Re:Oh brother

[Ihmhi]

You .. are a moron.

You... fail at reading comprehension.

Did you read my post at all?

What reason (aside from socialization and exercise) would I ever want to leave my home if I had the option not to?

You know, right at the end? Why would I need to get paid to surf the net all day if I hit the fucking lotto or something?

(Disclaimer: I know the lottery is a tax for people who are bad at math and I understand the extreme unliklihood of ever winning - just using a common example.)

Re:Oh brother

[s0nicfreak]

You can learn to fake it - and with the internet you can be a salesperson without ever actually dealing with people.

Re:Oh brother

[s0nicfreak]

Or with some sort of job that can be done over the internet...

Re:Oh brother

[s0nicfreak]

On the internet you can learn where to get land for free, how to build your own house for free, how to grow your own food for free, how to set up your own free (or even income-generating, if you sell enough power to electric companies) solar, wind, etc. power system, etc. You can easily use the internet to make enough money to pay for the internet connection, and if you put a little effort into it, you can make enough to buy laptops, tablets, and smartphones. And he obviously already has a computer - though in a couple of years it may not be able to run modern nor future games, it can probably run more old games than he could play in a lifetime (and there's enough legally free games to do that if he wouldn't pirate). As long as he knows how to keep his current computer working (if parts break there are free replacements on freecycle or craigslist), he doesn't really need to buy new laptops/tablets/smartphones.

Isn't that the point?

[jaymz666]

Isn't the point of the cloud to move all these services to central locations where they are managed by fewer people?

Re:Isn't that the point?

[gl4ss]

exactly. as such it's funny to hear about such a study.

that's pretty much the whole idea of IT, to reduce jobs/workload.

Re:Isn't that the point?

[PCM2]

With the rise of stuff like Puppet, Chef, etc., I cannot for the life of me imagine where these jobs are meant to come from.

Everyone stop saying "Not So Much"

[droidsURlooking4]

has everyone turned into an old jewish man?

Re:Everyone stop saying "Not So Much"

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah... they whine about other things.

Sure..

[wbr1]

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.

Re:Sure..

[vlm]

Does that mean that they have no right to a decent life?

Yes, the folks in charge want the 3rd world model, or the roman empire right before the fall model, where a couple people own everything, and everyone else is in extreme poverty.

Re:Sure..

[Anonymous Coward]

Sureeeeeeee... just cos you want your job, every small business will have its in house desktops (windows please.. they never break).. and of course while we are at it, why not have a in-house web server and a t1 line too ?

When your job becomes extinct, learn some new skills. Stop trying to keep the jobs alive.

The dumbest argument against Do-Not-Call list and for telemarketeers is... oh it is a job.. let them call you at 7.30pm just when you wanna sit down and eat.

Re:Sure..

[Fluffeh]

Yes, the folks in charge want the 3rd world model, or the roman empire right before the fall model, where a couple people own everything, and everyone else is in extreme poverty.

Wow, really picking at your statements today Vlm, sorry old chap :)

I don't think that the folks necessarily WANT the others in extreme poverty, I think it just turns out that way. As the folks in power strive to make more money and more power, have their operations more and more efficient, it means that less of their wealth is being passed downward, which will eventually lead to the scenario you describe. If you look at it long term, I think driving the masses into utter poverty is probably a very bad idea for the folks in charge. History is replete with incidents where the masses turned on their masters due to poverty and too much disparity between their two positions.

Re:Sure..

[Anonymous Coward]

So you are suggesting a slavery model then. People who work and produce things, the slaves, and those who don't but deserver a great lifestyle with everything they need provided for them.

I had thought we moved beyond such things, but this is becoming an increasingly popular opinion recently.

Re:Sure..

[tqk]

When your job becomes extinct, learn some new skills. Stop trying to keep the jobs alive.

Yeah. Let me know when that plan blows up in your face, and I'll fix it for you, at four times the cost of doing it inhouse.

Hell, make it six. You're saving boatloads by not paying for salaried workers.

Hmm, make it eight. Schmuck!

Re:Sure..

[Dr_Barnowl]

They know it too ; search for the Citibank "Plutonomy" newsletters, in which they advise their investors that the biggest risk to their investments is that the proles might rise up and vote for a more even distribution of the wealth.

Re:Sure..

[roman_mir]

Does that mean that they have no right to a decent life?

- there is no such right. Right is a concept that only makes sense between the individual and the government (collective), a right of an individual is something that government in principle is not allowed to violate. There is no such concept when we talk about 2 individuals or any other 2 entities, none of which is government.

There is no 'right to' something, there is only 'right not to be violated by government' in various senses.

Reallocation

[omganton]

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.

Re:Reallocation

[jaymz666]

Not really. If there were no benefits to moving to the cloud, because the same resources were needed, then these cloud service providers couldn't lower costs much.

The end result will be less IT employed and worse SLAs for companies. Instead of a single outage affecting one company, it will affect many.

Re:Reallocation

[afidel]

Bingo, you've described the real world situation with the cloud exactly.

Re:Reallocation

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget security. With a bunch of company eggs in one basket, it doesn't take much for a rogue employee to sneak in a USB flash drive, copy off some data, and go out and sell it. The cloud client would have no proof that it happened, and the cloud provider could just play the three monkeys game, or even retaliate with legal threats ("prove that the breach happened with us, or we sue for libel".)

Of course, there is one thing about the cloud... it requires network connectivity. Which means there has to be someone familar with routing and network security at any site. So, net admin jobs are not going anywhere. PCs will still be around, as it is doubtful another Javastation/X-Station/dumb terminal [1] push would succeed much.

I don't see the job creation with regard to cloud computing. At the high end enterprise scale where there is cash available, rack and blades are almost a commodity, and coupled with vMotion, it just means having a tech physically pull dead blades out and replace them.

Of course, we can look at Apple's data center. With the amount of storage that facility has, the amount of actual jobs it has brought is like 20-30 admins, a few guys for facilities, and maybe some guys as techs to deliver parts when the Teradata or EMC VNX systems need them. Not much at all.

[1]: We see this cycle in computers every so often, with the "dumbness" being moved up the stack. First it was just hardware and serial terminals. Then machines got an X server, and we had X terminals. Then a JVM that could run some stuff locally. Now, we see machines with enough smarts to run Web browsers, such as ChromeOS. The result will be limited adoptation each cycle.

Re:Reallocation

[Americano]

If there were no benefits to moving to the cloud, because the same resources were needed, then these cloud service providers couldn't lower costs much.

What about all of the myriad smaller companies where a fraction of a person is the only real resource needed for IT, and which a centralized (read: shared) provider suddenly makes a lot of services accessible to them?

Because when faced with the proposition of hiring a "full time IT guy for salary to do 8 hours a week worth of work," most small businesses don't have the revenues to pay for another full time employee, so somebody who already works for them ends up putting on an IT hat 8 hours a week. Because the law tends to frown on dismemberment, hiring a fraction of a person is only generally possible in scenarios where a pool of employers is able to each pay a fraction of a single person's salary.

Re:Reallocation

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice strawman you've constructed there. Don't smoke around him, he'll catch fire.

Re:Reallocation

[Americano]

Nice meaningless counter-argument you've constructed there. Perhaps you'd like to actually address the substance of my comment, rather than hand-waving it away because it's inconvenient for you to use logic?

Lower quality of service

[vlm]

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?

Re:Lower quality of service

[Anonymous Coward]

Whenever Big Money starts uttering the phrase "creates jobs", you know they are no longer talking about a viable business. Big Money is not in business to create jobs, they're in it to generate profit; "Creating jobs" is what election hopefuls promise. The purveyors of "The Cloud" have come realize that virtually nobody wants to succumb to centralized extra-corporate control, so they're spinning it as a job-creator. Maybe it's a proaction, leading up to getting the government to prop it up financially, while they focus on pushing customers into centralized control.
The Cloud is for sheep and idiots. Just say no.

More likely to go into bonuses than hiring

[elrous0]

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.

Re:More likely to go into bonuses than hiring

[fragfoo]

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.

Yep, I also learned everything I know about management from reading Dilbert.

Re:More likely to go into bonuses than hiring

[couchslug]

"Or they'll just put it towards profits and big bonuses for the CEO and senior staff, creating no jobs at all."

As a CEO, your ideas intrigue me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:More likely to go into bonuses than hiring

[19thNervousBreakdown]

Well, then you're one step ahead of management.

You just can't "cloud" good writing, apparently

[jeffmeden]

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.

Re:You just can't "cloud" good writing, apparently

[Anonymous Coward]

True that.

It is called progress

[perbu]

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.

It will create 14 million jobs

[0123456]

But they'll be in China and India.

Re:It will create 14 million jobs

[Maxo-Texas]

Maybe in india. China is about tapped for available workers and has been seeing up to 100% annual salary inflation on the low end jobs ($200 to $400) and 20% salary inflation in the middle jobs ($5k to $6k). India still has available workers but is seeing similar rates of salary inflation.

It will be a painful 6 to 8 years more, but at some point it won't make financial sense to outsource / off shore jobs.

However the cloud is really also about automation and robotics. Those trends are in place in all countries. If a robot can do the typical human's job for $5k U.S., then that's what the typical job compensation will ultimately fall to.

Currently robots are replacing people jobs that pay about $18k U.S. and there was a post here about replacing a million chinese laborers who were making much lower wages.

This will literally break the capitalistic model and it's going to happen fairly soon (couple decades at most). There will be almost no job that can't be done by robots except for those involving creativity.

Re:It will create 14 million jobs

[jamstar7]

The management jobs will go to India & China. The grunt-work IT jobs will go to Uzbekistan. Hey, those budding capitalists need work, too.

Re:It will create 14 million jobs

[shutdown -p now]

You think it's going to end at China and India? Chinese are already setting up infrastructure in Africa; that's where the next outsourcing craze will be.

Re:It will create 14 million jobs

[turbidostato]

"It will be a painful 6 to 8 years more, but at some point it won't make financial sense to outsource / off shore jobs."

Please have a look at a world map and maybe you'll realize there are more countries apart from USA, China and India and some of them will be ready to take the place when China and India become "too expensive".

Re:It will create 14 million jobs

[Maxo-Texas]

Insufficient rule of law and monoculture. Too many nations and too many laws. Too low a concentration of people. Poor infrastructure.

China and India are single large chunks of people. It's going to be much more difficult to this with peru, albania, congo, etc.

If China and India were 1 mile long trains, most other countries are a 1970's VW Microbus.

Re:It will create 14 million jobs

[Provocateur]

But the good news is, at least, they were all sleeping when this news came out on /.

Re:It will create 14 million jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

Automatic circuit design algorithms, bridge design software, etc all do the heavy lifting and have all the drawings sent straight to the CNC machines to punch it out. There's a lot of creativity that's simply generational, tested randomness & computers are great at that.

Still need services

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Not likely...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Not likely...

[jholyhead]

Today your boss doesn't see the sense of it, but he will one day - either that or he'll get fired when your business is no longer competitive in the marketplace.

There are no safe jobs. Only complacent workers.

Re:Not likely...

[Bengie]

Which cloud service do they use? I would assume they don't need one and I can't find anything on the topic.

Re:Not likely...

[PCM2]

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.

Data loss may not be insurable, but surely cloud providers offer some indemnification, or who would use them?

Meanwhile, if you "can't trust yourselves not to fuck up" and you can't trust the cloud provider either, then it's a wash. You go with whichever one is cheaper. (And in the long run, that ain't gonna be paying your salary, healthcare, and other benefits.)

What's more, I think you can trust a nationwide company that spends 100 percent of its capital investments on hosting infrastructure a lot more than you can trust your rinky-dink outfit. I think your assessment of your job stability is overconfident.

Re:Not likely...

[AK Marc]

That's the point. They sell the cloud, but don't use the cloud. Google doesn't outsource its IT department, nor does MS. Those pushing the cloud most are the ones least likely to use it. And those buying the cloud don't notice this.

Re:Not likely...

[Anonymous Coward]

Your boss may not see the sense.. but then he probably would have been one those who will always generate electricity in the backyard.

Re:Not likely...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the point. They sell the cloud, but don't use the cloud. Google doesn't outsource its IT department, nor does MS. Those pushing the cloud most are the ones least likely to use it. And those buying the cloud don't notice this.

One of those companies you mention outsources their IT deptartment to almost 4 layers of staffing agency's down.

Things like Cisco switch configuration is being done by Vijay and Pradeep in india. No joke.

Re:Not likely...

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw a large company said they love cloud, and love the fact their cain dial up a virtual server and be go in 10 minutes!

If you fail to pay the bill on time (no excuses) I presume they will hose he VM with 0% chance of data restore. Ever seen 'unused' servers 're-initialized' because a sleepy manager chose not to reply.

The manta of decrentralize everything on the 'cloud' is all dandy until unlimited and exponential billing is brought home with a 'you want backups for that' also comes in.

As with iPhone apps, the slow boil, slow 'extra' and extra apps over time is a model that works with greed, and at the end of the day, will cost more than centralization in the long run.

Stop or forget that bill, and your corporate plug will be yanked,

Re:Not likely...

[Bengie]

Cloud really only gives you two main benefits

1) Outsource
2) Simple dynamic scaling

MS can't outsource to itself, so #1 doesn't matter. #2 only matters if you don't already run a large datacenter. The larger your service, the less bursty usage it gets.

Cloud is mostly useful for small to medium companies.

Re:Not likely...

[AK Marc]

Outsouce isn't a benefit. "reducing cost" is a benefit that many people associate with outsourcing. There is no "scaling" in the cloud to the customer (aside from possible scaling of cost based on usage). Since neither of those apply (in my opinion), I still have never seen any compelling argument for the cloud, and those selling the cloud don't use it, so the salesmen agree. Would you buy a Ford from a Ford dealer where every employee of the dealer drove a Chevy (parked out back in the employee lot)?

Re:Not likely...

[Bengie]

They don't claim cloud reduces costs for everyone, it reduces capital investment and removes having under-utilized admins, which is very costly for small systems.

"Would you buy a Ford from a Ford dealer where every employee of the dealer drove a Chevy (parked out back in the employee lot)?"

It's more like Ford selling race cars, but their employees don't drive race cars themselves, outside of testing.

Re:Not likely...

[AK Marc]

It's more like Ford selling race cars, but their employees don't drive race cars themselves, outside of testing.

No, not even close. Perhaps you could have made some argument about selling race cars but not having a company team, but your analogy is so deliberately flawed, I can only take it to be a lie.

The question is, why are you so supportive of the cloud that you must lie to support it? MS sells a product they refuse to use themselves. Google, HP, IBM and others also sell cloud and do not use it. Why are the biggest peddlers of cloud unwilling to use it?

In my company it actually does

[cdrnet]

... but on my counting, the result is not *more* jobs, but simply *more interesting* ones.

Adapt or Die

[jholyhead]

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.

Re:Adapt or Die

[FlyingGuy]

Ok, well I will start by killing you so I can have your job. That takes care of the adapting part. As to the rest...

What your Darwinian argument fails to take into account is rate of change. Evolution takes millions of years, what we are seeing now is happening in less then a single generation. Now you can try an compare that to say the auto industry but because those factories were run by lots and lots of people, there was time for the buggy whip makers and dung collectors to adapt wince it just basically moved the work force from one industry to another. That is not happening here.

Re:Adapt or Die

[jholyhead]

The rate of change is fast by evolution standards, but it is still years between a shift becoming inevitable and it completing. The cloud has been on the way for the best part of a decade. It has been called different things along the way, but the basic concepts have stayed the same and technology has been catching up, making it easier to implement, cheaper to maintain and more reliable to run. If the cloud has surprised you, it is because you weren't paying attention.

Re:Adapt or Die

[Americano]

Good thing we don't need to EVOLVE the skills we need to survive in a cloud service dominated world, and can instead LEARN them via an educational system that's already in place.

On a side note, did you also really think it took millions of years of evolution to turn buggy whip makers into auto manufacturers?

Re:Adapt or Die

[PCM2]

a pencil and paper draughtsman?

OT perhaps, but I know an architect who still does all his drawings with pencil and paper. He had to train on computerized systems to pass his exams, but then it was right back to pencil and paper. He just prefers it that way.

Re:Adapt or Die

[CAIMLAS]

Except, with IT, it is different. Fletchers, tanners, and pencil/paper draftsmen did one thing and did it well. IT? We're expected to know a lot about many different things, and do them flawlessly. Our MO is retraining. Problem being you can't really (easily) hop from one field to another completely while working in IT: IT takes too much time to do night at school, etc.

Guess what? There isn't much to retrain to anymore, either. And it won't be hapless hyuck hyuck helpdesk types who lose their jobs, it'll be the people who actually keep the backend systems running, maintain equipment, and so on. It won't make things any better for most new customers, either.

Re:Adapt or Die

[Anonymous Coward]

Tanners make the leather your shoes are made of......Still a viable job, as is fletching. Just have to know where your market is. Pencil and Paper draughtsman are still out there. Horse whip makers also make a living............Just a niche market rather than wholesale manufacturing. But lets ignore these skilled jobs as relics of a bygone era.

Re:Adapt or Die

[Anonymous Coward]

There's an old saying that applies to you. It is better to stay silent and be thought a fool.

...and can instead LEARN them via an educational system that's already in place.

For what jobs? Really, go on, list them? In an on-going economic downturn, with millions unemployed and no sign of where to find jobs, you advocate retraining en masse? In what field? It's not a case of "each person will decide for himself," since most of these people already have decided, and those jobs have all gone away.

Perhaps they could be engineers. No, wait, that won't work. It's too specialised, we don't need that many engineers.

How about teachers? But we already have too many of them.

How about managers? Although I think we have too many of them, too. Geologists, anthropologists, city councillors, psychologists, police, army....

Face it: we are in a situation where there just aren't enough jobs, and as more and more go away, there are fewer and fewer opportunities. Hell, the ratio of opportunities available to a person decreases as the number of people looking for opportunities increase.

did you also really think it took millions of years of evolution to turn buggy whip makers into auto manufacturers?

That would be really fucking stupid, wouldn't it?

I wouldn't have thought buggy whip makers, people who work with leather, would have gone into mechanical engineering. I would have thought they would be more likely to go into clothing, bootmaking, textiles, that sort of thing. But then, I'm not you.

Re:Adapt or Die

[Americano]

For what jobs? Really, go on, list them? In an on-going economic downturn, with millions unemployed and no sign of where to find jobs, you advocate retraining en masse? In what field? It's not a case of "each person will decide for himself," since most of these people already have decided, and those jobs have all gone away.

Are you really that thick? We're talking about some (fairly small %) of IT personnel being affected by centralization of service providers in the IT industry - not the elimination of a whole industry and its related services and manufacturing. You make it sound as if this centralization of services means half the IT industry would stop existing, and all the people working in it will be left destitute, with completely useless skills.

I wouldn't have thought buggy whip makers, people who work with leather, would have gone into mechanical engineering. I would have thought they would be more likely to go into clothing, bootmaking, textiles, that sort of thing.

... and people with IT skills will go into other development jobs, or system administration jobs, or database jobs, or any of the entire fucking galaxy of other IT jobs that will remain, untouched, unchanged, and still quite relevant and necessary, even after companies consolidate into shared cloud services.

Re:Adapt or Die

[Anonymous Coward]

History shows time and time again, in order for those changes to happen, something has to change in society. Either it happens slowly and by all mean it is adjusted either it happens violently and quickly. And I don't see any changes in laws or in general perception...

The cloud

[Bengie]

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.

Re:The cloud

[jholyhead]

Microsoft have been pumping resources into Azure recently, both in terms of money and in terms of their best people. They're all-in at this point.

Re:The cloud

[zlives]

On-premise/ hybrid cloud is how you can use the word "cloud" in your report :)

Re:The cloud

[hoppo]

"I find it strange for MS to do an about-face and claim cloud as an actual replacement for a proper in-house IT."

I don't know if this is 180 degrees from earlier marketing messages. In Microsoft's case, at least.

That's kind of what we see when the reality of the situation intersects with the dream being sold before the technology matured. In an "all other things remaining constant" scenario, that would spell doom for IT admins. But as the cloud market matures, physical hardware costs diminish, power requirements get lower (meaning less money spent on electricity), and hosting/bandwidth centers decrease their prices. For certain operations, it doesn't even make sense for a full cloud deployment. Which is why the tactic Microsoft is taking is to sell hybrid models, and it's also probably what led Amazon to unveil its VPC.

Who knows what the future holds? In 1993, still less than two decades ago, we could not have predicted what this Internet thing would turn into. Maybe we'll be out of jobs in a few years, or maybe this opens up new and different challenges for the future. Regardless, I have to get back to work.

Re:The cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

"I've very recently been doing some digging into "the cloud" [...] All marketing/tech literature that I find from Microsoft"

No wonder your superiors commanded you some research about the cloud. The sooner they get rid of you the better for them.

Re:The cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody seems to actually know the 'official' definition for a cloud, especially managers.

We even have 'Private' clouds, and clouds that offer more than just storage, and clouds of different flavours.
The real savings are are going to Linux, and using cheap bog off the shelf drives, not paying for some cost + value add service that you can't easilly transfer off. If you can't do that then ditch everything and go to google apps. On track record, they seem be be better than the MS soultion that refuse to mention the root cause of their outages.

Re:The cloud

[Bengie]

1) The topic is about Microsoft
2) We're an all MS shop. There is no real reason to look at the competition except to make sure the pricing is similar, which it is.

Re:The cloud

[Bengie]

I would define the "cloud" as: Scalable virtual-resource allocation and management.

Cloud is insecure

[Weezul]

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

Three strange assumptions

[vlm]

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.

Re:Three strange assumptions

[Anonymous Coward]

If scalability always worked, we'd only have one car company, one paper printing company, one taxi company, one book store, one food store...

We do have one book store and it is called amazon.com. If you can even find a local bookstore, in-store price is $5-$10 more per book. If the book is even available, that is. And once there are robots (or vacuum tubes) that can instantaneously deliver perishable food, there may only be one food store. Currently there are some regulations that control number of supermarkets. I am told that a local Shaws closed due to exceeding number of allowed stores in the same vicinity (I don't know the details).

As soon as you hear the phrase "create jobs"...

[John Hasler]

...you might as well walk away. What follows is always bullshit.

Uhh, no

[Tridus]

"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.

Re:Uhh, no

[Pecisk]

Denial is not the right way to deal with the change.

Cloud *is* making low level admins out of job. I know hundreds of companies which uses Google Apps and leaves management of IT to one guy who is managing about such ten companies at once. And I have to break sad news for you - I actually can't remember where I have seen company with it's own web server within their own server room. Either it is old physical server at data center, but mostly it is virtual server instance at huge system, or even a shared host (not very wise idea if you are about getting tons of visitors, but for startup - it all matters how much it cost).

You probably won't like the truth but IT *finally* helps common crowd to deal with their business - and it cuts their costs too. Yep, medium and high level sysadmins will be needed. Also there will be need for virtualisation gurus. But if you are in small administration, then you should understand that change is happening.

In fact, I don't worry about admins. Because as far as I know admins are most adaptive people from IT sector.

Re:Uhh, no

[jaymz666]

We host all our external web servers at a colo facility across the road from our campus. They have bigger pipes.

Re:Uhh, no

[AK Marc]

"The cloud" doesn't get rid of the need for computers at the office,

You aren't thinking big enough. An office full of harddrive-less PXE boot computers that are essentially dumb terminals for the Cloud Ap, with all printers and such supported by vendors, and everything else "in the cloud" other than Ethernet wiring (routers and firewalls remotely monitored/administered from the Cloud).

If you are willing to pay enough, you can eliminate 100% of IT.

Re:Uhh, no

[turbidostato]

""The cloud" doesn't get rid of the need for computers at the office, or networks, or people to support it."

Yet.

Re:Uhh, no

[Nethead]

And that's why I'll never be outsourced. I'm a field "engineer" taking care of all those retail shops, big box stores, and gas stations. I've signed up with several national "truck roll" companies and they keep me quite busy. Lots of in-state travel and something different everyday. 2-4 jobs a day. Yesterday was fixing fiber at a Lowe's, bringing up a router at a mall jewelers, installing a small office VoIP system, and then replacing a POS terminal at a juice store. Tomorrow is hanging an IP connected TV at a Social Security office and then doing PM and site surveys on VoIP systems at potato packing plants on the dry-side.

I can live anywhere I want since this work is everywhere. Which means I can live in a small native fishing village on Puget Sound. Anyway, I just couldn't handle the office day in and out anymore. I love getting out and seeing places and meeting people.

Re:Uhh, no

[Anonymous Coward]

Then quit thinking small and only tackling low level tasks and start bringing your tradecraft to the next higher level. Otherwise, you're either going to be waiting in the unemployment line or lobbying for more featherbedding (the practice of forcing employers to hire people they don't need).

Since when is tech supposed to creat jobs?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I have no sympathy

[presidenteloco]

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.

14 Million coders - for all the bugs

[omnichad]

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.

Just scare mongering

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Does not matter.

[Lumpy]

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.

Re:Does not matter.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Awesome! I'm able to read some of your employee's email without even having to leave my house.

Re:Does not matter.

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine the amount of socks one could buy with that bonus!

Re:Does not matter.

[Anonymous Coward]

I mentioned we say screw it and eliminate the position and stay with Google.

Better triple-check your SLA, and if client data gets compromised it's your ass, not theirs. Seriously.

Re:Does not matter.

[Anonymous Coward]

we fired the Exchange guy ... for doing nasty things in the building

...we have insane requirements for little to no pay.

Sounds to me you had the right man for the job all along...

Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

It's the process, stupid

[swb]

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.

Re:It's the process, stupid

[Surt]

This is definitely why a civil society will allocate a substantial portion of its output to retraining. Essentially, to be morally right about it, we should tax the rich until everyone has sufficient training to compete for jobs.

Computing is mostly mature sector

[Colin Smith]

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.

Re:Computing is mostly mature sector

[Desler]

but till then all we'll get are bubbles like Apple or Facebook.

How exactly is Apple a bubble? Showing off your bias a bit much?

Re:Computing is mostly mature sector

[Colin Smith]

Don't worry you'll see fairly soon.
 

Re:Computing is mostly mature sector

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple is bubble, as soon as smart phones and tablets become commodity (like MP3 players and laptops did) new smartphone will cost $50 and tablet maybe $75, that will drop margins from few hundred $ to $20 or less per unit and reduce market cap of Apple (and any other company making smart-phones and tablets) it might not happen this year, but it WILL happen :)

Re:Computing is mostly mature sector

[schnikies79]

You're assuming that Apple won't branch out or move into other areas. They aren't dumb and they will move to where the money is.

Re:Computing is mostly mature sector

[dave420]

A cloud? And no, it's not a mainframe. Yes, you might think of it as such as you know of mainframes, but that's simply not the case. It would be more akin to a company hosting mainframes which you could enable, disable, and rebuild all remotely (hundreds or thousands of miles away), for cents on the hour. Which is nothing like the mainframes of the past. I really hope you were joking.

Re:Computing is mostly mature sector

[insertwackynamehere]

Like MP3 players did? Like how people stopped buying iPods? Oh wait

Re:Computing is mostly mature sector

[tqk]

How exactly is Apple a bubble? Showing off your bias a bit much?

You're speaking volumes, but I don't think it's saying what you think it is. "Showing off your bias a bit much?" That's damned near funny, hipster.

Re:Computing is mostly mature sector

[noh8rz2]

tl;dr

Least common denominator in the cloud

[Dareth]

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.

How to make one plus one equal 2000

[redkcir]

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.

Re:How to make one plus one equal 2000

[plopez]

And the W. administration and the the Reagan administration. Give it a break.

Re:How to make one plus one equal 2000

[redkcir]

True. It's just the O admin is in power now. Still doesn't make it right (or left depending on your point of view).

Cloud To Create 14 Million Jobs?

[Anonymous Coward]

14 Million Steve Jobs... I'm not sure what the world would look like with 14M of them....

IT? ain't helpin anyone

[Anonymous Coward]

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

IT dpts won't shrink, services will increase...

[grelmar]

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.

The way it should be

[lymond01]

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.

Re:The way it should be

[Anonymous Coward]

Anonymous for reasons that will be obvious. I totally relate to paret's story. At my old job, we spent 6 months developing some in-house software to replace a library we were licensing from a crappy vendor. The vendor was charging us around $2500/copy, and our end product cost was around $6000/copy. Our new in-house stuff was miles ahead of the tosh we had been licensing (we were replacing it mostly due to user and developer frustration, not cost). We showed it to the boss, who looked at the new shiny with glee. We then told him it would save the company $2500/copy. His response?

"More than that! Because it's new and shiny, we can charge more for it that the old one!"

A free market does not always mean that savings get passed along to the customer. Sometimes, all the vendors independently decide to bleed the customer dry.

Re:The way it should be

[toddestan]

My favorite version of that is when they want to keep the previous version of the product around as a low cost budget option or some other nonsense. Yes, I've actually seen an inferior product that cost significantly more to build being sold for less than the improved product with reduced costs to build. Pointing out that we weren't really making any money when someone ordered the budget option really didn't get anywhere. Sales guys loved having it as a fall-back option, and they still got their commission so they didn't care.

The goal of IT is automation

[plopez]

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.

faulty reasoning

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Clones?

[Anonymous Coward]

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....

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Reduce working day hours accordingly!

[Anonymous Coward]

And thats it!

headline

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Shovels or spoons?

[ace37]

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?”

The cloud sure is working well for social networks

[Anonymous Coward]

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 does - quality of life changes

[ace37]

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.

hello math?

[Anonymous Coward]

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'.

Re:WANT the others in extreme poverty

[TaoPhoenix]

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".

Welcome to IT, adapt quickly or go away

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

And in the process ... you are giving away company

[Anonymous Coward]

..... 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.

Did you hear about the study from Microsoft...

[hcs_$reboot]

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.

Until others start gaming the system

[Nefarious Wheel]

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...

Re:Until others start gaming the system

[jaymz666]

No, posting internal videos to a public site viewable to anyone is not a great idea.
1) You can't control them and guarantee they will always be there
2) You can't control who sees them.

Lump of Labour Fallacy

[Flarston Marston]

Ever heard of the lump of labour fallacy - this is one of those. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

These jobs...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

hilarious.

[Johann Lau]

http://sandboxx.org/file/3687/

Re:The cloud - taking back control

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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.

Cloud Schmoud

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Useful cloud?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I'm lucky I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

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.