Gartner, Forrester, etc. are the bane of my existence in IT, because they promote magical thinking among executives, but this time they're right about something.
No one is prepared to deal with the dirty little secret of the information age -- that there are going to be huge swaths of the population who will be out of work, with no prospects for future employment. The last time around, it was low-skilled factory workers. Now it's the middle class's turn! And when half the country has no money and no work, they're going to get angry.
I don't think the current generation of office workers is really thinking about how much less of them will be needed once companies get around to squeezing every single nickel out of every single business process. It's already happening on a huge scale, even in the IT sector. Anything rules-based is basically fair game for automation. Think back a couple of decades -- how many millions of bookkeepers, accountants, secretaries, low-level report-consolidation managers, etc. did large companies employ and pay a decent middle class salary to? Each one of those went out and bought those large companies' products, bought houses, cars and vacations. Now that strong base of consumers is disappearing, or they need to finance their purchases through debt because their wages don't keep up. Large numbers of corporate jobs can still be summed up as "I look at reports from this location, perform a few calculations and summarize the resulting numbers for my management by emailing them a spreadsheet." No one can tell me that the accountants haven't noticed this...
The vast majority of people in the middle class, in my opinion, are averse to social welfare policies simply because they don't think anything bad is ever going to happen to them. Worse, they think that if they support the richest people and just try really hard, they'll eventually be rich themselves. This thinking is going to backfire hard on them when their nice safe job is automated or no longer needed. For example, the most vocal opinions of the new healthcare law in the US are typically middle class families who get their insurance coverage through work and have never had to worry about not having it. Try explaining to them that there are a significant number of working individuals who can't afford insurance and you get, "But...but...socialism!!" All I can say is the next few years will be very interesting. If you believe the Star Trek TNG writers, it's going to take a massive upheaval to get to a post-scarcity utopia.
The only long-term "stability" I've seen lately isn't even really stability -- it's contract work. I'm still an FTE simply because I have a family and don't want a divorce because I'm travelling around the country 300 days a year. But, I have many people I've worked with who have quite the lifestyle simply because they make multiples of a typical full time salary by stitching contract jobs together. It's amazing to me that a company doesn't hire permanent staff because it's "so expensive' and then turns around and hires contractors at $150+ an hour, who basically work the same 40 hour schedule. The downsides are that you basically have to run a business as well as do your actual job, and from what people have told me, the travel really drains you after a while. Favorite comment from a consultant friend of mine, "That first class seat on the plane doesn't make much difference when you're sleeping the whole flight because you're dead tired." (I disagree, I'm 6'2" and coach travel is awful...)
The real secret is to make your own stability, and the problem is that it takes lots of self control. You need to pay off your house, not buy crap you can't afford if you lose your job, and save money both for now and for later. Being unemployed sucks, but being unemployed AND having creditors knocking on the door is worse. I'm a big stability fan too, and I tend to choose employers who are also stable, but these days you can never tell.
One of the things that might change things a little bit in the stability department is the whole healthcare reform thing. A lot of people I know are basically trapped in full time employment because they or their family member has some medical problem that makes getting private insurance unworkable. Even if you have to pay full price for a plan from the insurance companies, (a) you'll actually get coverage, and (b) hopefully the cost will be closer to the group rates large employers get.
Software or IT work will eventually lose its salary advantage, but I think things might be better if various factions in the IT field come together and actually make it a branch of "real" engineering or a profession, with the same education requirements and barriers to entry that other professions have.
A-L has been going down the tubes for quite a while. It's pretty amazing to think that part of the company used to be the mighty Bell Labs. You know, Unix, the transistor, one of the last corporate-funded basic research institutes... It kind of makes me want to have the old AT&T monopoly back just to have that.
Admittedly, they probably do have huge legacy costs in the form of less productive employees and products that don't make them as much money anymore. Also, the telecom landscape has changed a lot over the years. I work for a similar company, and while our group works on newish stuff, there's a ton of older products just sitting around that used to be very high margin and no longer have the revenue to support their costs.
That said, it's never good when an older, established company suddenly announces a monster layoff like this. In the older companies, you just know it's going to be 10,000 58-year-olds in the developed countries who will suddenly find themselves out of work with zero prospects for new employment, hanging on until Social Security kicks in. That's the sad part of these "smartsizings" -- when you're just a number in a spreadsheet, companies have no idea how much you still have to offer in terms of talent and experience. I'm approaching the ripe old age of 40 now, and am constantly staying on top of all the new stuff just to keep the skill set sharp. That's one thing I could do without in the IT "profession" -- so much new buzzwordy stuff is rehashes of technology decades old with better supporting technology. Too bad Gartner and their ilk are the only ones that CIOs listen to!
I saw the first post was "what's so special about a company changing their collaboration software?" Allow the old man here from simpler times to explain.:-)
The reason why it's a big shift is because, at this point, Notes is beyond legacy status when it comes to email/collaboration apps. I don't know how much success Whirlpool will have with Google Apps, but I imagine their users will be happier. For anyone in the IT business in the early/mid 90s and forward, especially if you worked for an IBM shop, you probably have had some exposure to Lotus (now IBM) Notes. My company is still a Notes customer, most probably because of a sweetheart licensing deal or just inertia (I work in our product engineering group, corporate IT is handled separately in my company.) Notes was one of the first "groupware" applications, and companies built huge, complex applications for it. (Oh yeah, I forgot, that's the other reason we're still Notes customers -- rewriting the few remaining mission critical apps with tons of mystical business logic embedded in them hasn't been done yet.) Anyway, email was just another application, and it was never Notes' strong suit. One thing it did have that was very important for 90s era road warriors dialing up from the middle of nowhere was the ability to truly work offline and replicate messages when you had the chance. Outlook only got good at this around 2003, so Notes also had a pretty big following in consulting shops and places that had a lot of disconnected or poorly connected locations. Remember, kiddies, when Notes got its start, the Internet was still an academic exercise and as early as 1998 or so, slow dial up was the norm. That's the environment Notes was built to run in.
Anyway, IBM has been keeping Notes on life support for ages,along with Lotus Symphony which it inherited when it bought Lotus. The latest clients have almost completely been rewritten in Java with some native front end code, and it's very slow. One thing Microsoft has done a pretty good job with is the Outlook/Exchange combo in terms of user responsiveness. But Notes still has some of the 90s look and feel in it, and it really seems like they gave the recent client upgrade project to a bunch of new grads in India (which, given that it's IBM, isn't a shocker.)
Notes is a good lesson in what happens when a formerly decent software product gets ignored for a long time -- a sort of "software rot" slowly sets in and competitors just keep adding new stuff while you stand still. MS Office isn't exactly the same thing -- they're constantly bloating it with new stuff; not really standing still the way IBM has done with Notes.
It'll be interesting to see how quickly Office 365, Adobe Creative Cloud and Google Apps are taken up by businesses. It'll sure change the landscape for IT guys -- lots of my "professional" colleagues who rely on knowing strange obscure software features over systems engineering work are going to be very surprised one day when companies are just renting applications and need fewer in house people to feed them. I've seen this coming for a while and have been preparing -- even if the whole thing fizzles out, it's good to be multi-talented.
See my other comment -- your argument holds water only if we allow the current black market to continue with the criminal penalties removed.
If someone were able to walk into a store and buy absolutely pure meth (for example) the following costs disappear: - Many of the health costs (ingesting a pure substance synthesized by a drug company vs. one contaminated with very toxic solvents) - Many of the criminal costs -- (1) it would be cheaper, meaning you might not have to steal to feed your habit, (2) transactions would be in the open, not controlled by organized crime or random drug dealers, (3) you wouldn't have to waste resources throwing people in jail. - Random houses out in the country getting blown up because of a poor understanding of organic solvent extraction chemistry
Yes, you're going to have other consequences, but they're all better than what we have now. And, they can be counteracted. There are plenty of rehab facilities for people who want to get clean, and funding those beats funding prisons to warehouse people that will just keep coming back.
Treat every drug like alcohol and tobacco -- regulate it, tax it, and use the proceeds to clean up the rest of the problems associated with its use. We already fund methadone clinics for heroin addicts -- that's not just for fun; it's a cost we've chosen to take on in exchange for more controlled addicts and a lower rate of IV drug-borne diseases.
An interesting side point that comes out of all this is that services like Silk Road wouldn't exist if there wasn't a market for them.
I'm about as far from Libertarian as you can get, but one thing I do think they have right is the idea that the "war on drugs" should be stopped. It can't be won, that has been proven. Every single defense that's put up to stop drug trafficking is worked around shortly after it comes on the scene. Drug cartels basically run large parts of Mexico and Central America. US citizens get tossed in prison for drug use and sales, which basically turns them into a wasted resource (good luck getting a normal job with a prison record) and this ends up costing more in the long run.
Prohibition basically gave birth to organized crime, simply because enough of the population wanted to keep drinking alcohol and was willing to break the law. As a result, we saw what we see now with other drugs -- the price of alcohol shot up, other ancillary crime increased, violent gangs brutally wiped each other out neighborhood by neighborhood in big cities. With drugs it's the same thing -- I have no desire to use drugs, but there are plenty of others who do. And they'll do whatever it takes to do so, and pay whatever street price is prevalent. Econ 101 -- inelastic demand (more like infinite demand) in the face of constrained supply means prices keep going up no matter what you do.
I believe drug use is a completely victimless crime -- it's the other stuff that happens alongside it (stealing to pay for expensive drugs, drunk/high driving, etc.). If everything were readily available, sold in safe doses and taxed appropriately (like tobacco and alcohol,) prices would be low and people wouldn't have to steal to pay for their habits.
The other thing to consider is that we're rapidly heading towards a sci-fi dystopian future where human labor is no longer as important as it is now. When the unemployment rate shoots up to 85%, wouldn't you rather fill their free time with something other than random crime sprees? Yes, it sounds very "Brave New World"-ish, but it's rapidly coming true. Unless society just drops the use of labor and money as measures of productivity, which will never happen, this is the inevitable future!
Didn't Nortel have "accounting irregularities" to deal with as well?
Other than that, it sounds familiar. If I remember correctly, Nortel overextended themselves during the dotcom boom, and didn't have anything to fall back on once people stopped buying networking gear. I think IBM got most of their patents -- there's a separate company that makes network switches for their blade systems.
I think Sun did something similar also -- too much overspending in the dotcom days, then people stopped buying expensive Unix servers.
In all reality, this private equity firm is probably going to strip all the remaining assets from BlackBerry and kill the company, but being out of the limelight is the best thing for a company in this situation to do.
When a company is publicly traded, you can _maybe_ get it to agree to changes that pay off in 1 or 2 quarters. The stock analysts and CNBC idiots make it so that every time the CEO goes to the bathroom is scrutinized for any shred of news. Anything beyond that 2-quarter limit just can't be done. Anything that involves tough decisions that affect share price can't be done either. BlackBerry needs that kind of time out of the public eye to fix the problems they have. It's too bad also -- because we're stuck in the position of having our retirements dependent on the fickle stock market (those of us without pensions, that is.) I think that if the stock market went back to being a rich man's club, and we didn't have entire news organizations waiting to pounce on every utterance that company executives make, the funding picture for companies would be much better. Look at how much negative press BlackBerry has endured -- no matter what they do, every news outlet says "they suck." Gee, why can't we keep the share price up? Why isn't anyone ignoring the advice and investing?
I echo the sentiments of others in this thread though -- Microsoft would be stupid to not buy the patents they have, and they could even fold the secure messaging stuff into Exchange.
One problem that IT folks often come across, especially with development jobs and especially at startups, is the expectation that long hours produce better results. Large companies also do this -- Google, Microsoft, etc. have on-site everything as a perk for employees, but also to keep them there for the maximum possible time. This works very well when you're just out of college -- you're used to working long hours to finish stuff, the dorm-like atmosphere is inviting, etc. But it really gets old when you're older, more established and have things outside of work like a marriage, family, etc.
Also, employers hate to add staff in IT roles because most of them see the entire function as a necessary evil. If you're in one of these places, you'll never get free of being called to fix stuff out of hours and working like crazy to put out fires. On top of that, many see themselves as "great places to work" and don't think that their workers feel any of this pain.
The one common myth throughout IT employment is that every place is like this. It isn't -- I happen to work for a place that allows flexible hours. And although we're lean in the staffing department and often have to work *a little* extra time, the workload isn't crushing. There are trade-offs, and people who work here know them. Pay isn't at the top of the range, the stuff we work on is typically not cutting edge (but not ancient either,) and the work our department does (systems integration) is very difficult if you don't have the right attitude/mindset/troubleshooting brain. In addition, those flexible hours get cashed in for marathon work sessions on very rare occasions. My company basically says "keep sane hours, make sure you're around for meetings, and we reserve the right to fly you halfway across the world if a disaster happens." I could get a job working myself to death for an investment bank or video game company, but I have a family at home now.
Seriously, not everywhere has a toxic culture. And yes, I'm aware that there are a lot of people who love working insane hours and have very little to do outside of work. That's why different companies have different work styles.
Hmmm, with mainstream Intel platforms approaching the power savings of SoCs, maybe Microsoft should drop the other shoe and kill off RT. If standard Windows will run acceptably on these devices, there's no reason to keep RT going!
One of the things I've never understood about these privatization deals is that people think it will save taxpayers tons of money. The simple truth is that some public goods should be provided by non-profit or state-owned companies simply to maintain the level of service.
An example from the US is the Postal Service vs. FedEx, UPS, etc. The private delivery services have squeezed every single nickel out of the process of delivering packages, and one of the ways they do this is cherry-picking the easy services to perform. They also charge a lot of money for this service unless you're a big company with a better contracted rate. Anyone can get a package from New York to Atlanta overnight . It's very different when an organization has a mandate to provide affordable delivery of letters from anywhere to anywhere in the US for the cost of a stamp. I can mail a letter from Key West, Florida to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska for 46 cents - that doesn't even cover the fuel required. FedEx and UPS don't directly deliver to areas of the country where it's not cost-effective to do so. The Postal Service has a Constitutional mandate to do this, so it has to be inefficient by nature. Since I'm not a business, I usually use the USPS to ship stuff just because the walk-up rates are way cheaper than FedEx, and now they even offer cheaper rates if you pre-pay the postage online. The USPS is under pressure to keep these rates low, has a huge workforce to pay, and has a congressional mandate to prepay their retiree medical and pension costs
There's plenty of other examples. Electric and gas utilities have to provide service at a cheap enough rate so almost anyone can afford it. Amtrak in the US has to run very unprofitable long-distance rail service and subsidize it by using the money it makes from its Northeast and California rail services.
The other thing to consider is employment. Especially now, given the fact that suitable jobs for the majority of the population are going away with no replacement work on the horizon, we need to find something for people to do. A privatized postal service will lay off everyone but the bare minimum number of people to keep the lights on, and outsource all the business processes to cheaper countries in the name of cost savings. This is where my "lefty socialist" tendencies kick in - Do we really want a world where 5% of the population are fabulously wealthy, 15% are working in jobs like IT, engineering, and others, and 80% have nothing to do and no prospects? Remember, the seismic shifts in employment last time generated better jobs. Subsistence farming went to organized agriculture, then mechanization of that caused a shift to factory work, then outsourcing of that caused a shift to service and paper-pushing jobs, now outsourcing and obsolescence of that leads to.....hmm....there's nothing for Joe Average to do anymore and a well-protected aristocracy with no incentive to help. That's a recipe for French Revolution 2.0.
I know economic theory isn't on my side, but I think monopolies are more efficient at delivering some types of services than others -- not from a dollar perspective but from a service delivery perspective. It may be more expensive, but think back to how reliable AT&T phone service was back before they were broken up. It was expensive, but it almost never went down. Obviously this doesn't apply to all goods and services, but those that have to be universal and cheap are not good candidates for privatization IMO.
I've worked in a few different settings in my career, and there's no denying the fact that there is a subset of the "IT crowd" that is described quite well by the show of the same name. Reasons can be debated for ages, and there are lots of theories -- lack of exposure to appropriate models of behavior, the silly "brogrammer" meme, etc. etc. etc. But the fact is that people like this who can't keep that side of them from showing and even coming through in their work make it impossible for IT to ever graduate to a "professional" field.
Some stereotypes (and actual real world examples I've seen) of IT folks would have you thinking that there are no people in the field who are married or who have normal relationships, have kids, etc. I can't tell you how many IT people I've met who have Asian mail-order brides and other not-normal relationship patterns. But there are a lot of us who wouldn't dream of getting up on stage and demoing an app like these guys made. Not because we're Puritans, or PC, or whatever, but because it's rude. I'm married and have two kids, one of whom is a girl. Normal relationships aren't compatible with being the drooling idiot in the strip club.
That said, I am aware that there's a difference between IT in an established company and the startup culture, especially in software development. I don't know what it is, but it's similar to the culture of sales organizations. Startups have a unique mix of type-A fraternity types with development nerds, and that culture creates a pretty big echo chamber for behavior like this.
Look at the very public examples of this kind of behavior in the last few years -- this thing, the "Twitter shaming" of a couple of nerds making a stupid joke at a conference, and this thing that totally boggles my mind. The behavior is surprising, but so is some of the reaction to it. It ranges from "that's really stupid" to "F you, PC police. If you're offended, I don't care."
I'm well aware that everyone has a right to free speech. But the IT industry will never shed its stereotype of being the nerds in the basement if we continue to allow things like this to be what the management class associates with us.
It's not good, but it's not our problem and it shouldn't be. So yes, in this case we should ignore it.
History shows that our intervention in this part of the world is disastrous, without exceptions. No matter who you back, or whatever justification you give, nothing will prevent one side of the conflict from getting angry that you're helping the other side. Not to mention that Syria is a sovereign country regardless of who's in charge now, so just walking in and invading because you're capable isn't going to be looked on favorably. We didn't win any friends invading Iraq or Afghanistan.
I'm a big believer in not trying to solve unfixable problems. You just end up pouring money and resources into a problem that will never go away. See the 20th century "containment" wars in Vietnam and Korea as well as the "war on drugs" and prohibition for examples of this.
Another good point. But here's another (IMHO) good point.:-)
Pension funds are invested for the incredibly long term. A brand-new employee's contributions have 30-40 years to grow in some cases. That's a lot of time to fix screw-ups and smooth out any volatility. The pensioner may not maximize their returns the same way they would if they had invested on their own, but they are guaranteed a payout at the end. Due to lack of education, I've heard of a lot of retirees who lost huge chunks of their nest egg around 2008 because they were too aggressive on stocks. Pension recipients don't have to worry (except about the company going bankrupt or ditching the pension plan.) They'll be getting regular checks every month until they die, while unlucky or uneducated self-investors have to change their lives based on the whims of the incredibly high speed market. And if those same retirees want some stability, their only choice is to buy a very expensive annuity with whatever they have left when retirement day comes.
I agree that people need financial education, but I do think that the stock market is not something that Average Joe should be forced to put their money in if they want to be something other than broke when they retire. Didn't George Carlin say something like "Think of how dumb the average person is, then think about how half of the people are dumber than that"? I don't mean to sound elitist or snobby, but most people just don't have the capability to understand this stuff. If they did, no one would carry a balance on a credit card, take out a payday loan, or bounce a check. Why force someone to make decisions that affect whether they're destitute or rich when they die? If they can't handle their personal day to day finances, long term planning is impossible to grasp!
Forcing everyone's retirement into stocks makes companies stop caring about the future beyond next quarter and fuels the CNBC idiots whipping up a frenzy over the tiniest scrap of market news.
"I think this is a terrible problem with education in America. People are afraid of the market, don't understand it, don't want to understand it, but that's due to simple lack of education. And it's important to know the basics, since it will likely affect your standard of living in retirement."
I agree, but I can also see the other side of it. Way back before technology made it possible to do day trading or HFT, it was actually a market that most educated people could get their heads around. And if you're a Buffett-style "value investor" who picks good companies and hangs onto stocks for a long time, a lot of the noise is still filtered out. But, I do think that online trading, instant access to information and cheap trades contribute to volatility. Volatility filters back to the average investor in the form of their account balance wildly swinging up and down for reasons that aren't 100% clear to them.
Some examples: Investment buy decision process, old school: "Hmm, the WSJ basically reprinted an IBM press release showing new and exciting products. I think I will buy 100 shares of the company and see where it goes. I will call my broker in the morning and pay $100 in fees, then I will own and hold these shares to see if they increase in value." Investment buy decision process, new school: "OMG, my trading platform's tech sector chart just blinked a brighter shade of green, looks like IBM is in play. Click, buy 100 shares IBM, 85 shares CSCO, 62 shares MSFT, 90 shares RHAT all for $7.95 or free if I trade hundreds of times a month."
Investment sell decision process, old school: "Hmm. the WSJ article I just read says IBM isn't keeping up with competitors. I've made a bit of money on this over the last 10 years, time to sell. Let's call the broker in the morning and maybe I'll do some research on where else to put the profits." Investment sell decision process, new school: "OMG, IBM missed their quarterly earnings by one cent. Wow, they suck. Sell sell sell! Twitter, "OMG, #IBM is #toast, get out now!!!!!' Stock message boards, "Smart money is in Cisco." Facebook: "Selling my IBM shares now, suggest you do the same." Wow, IBM is down 25% for the day, I wonder why?
If I were running a company that didn't need access to capital that only the stock market would bring, I'd never go public even if it meant Easy Street for me forever. Once a company does that, they will NEVER have control over anything they do.
One of the issues with all the "media marketplaces" like iTunes, Google Play and yes, the MS Store, is that they're not going to disappear anytime soon. I'm not sure how many people are going to abandon an entire app platform once they've sunk a lot of money into it. Before the smartphone era, changing phone carriers meant that you would have to rebuy a few ringtones and other carrier specific stuff, but an Apple to Android or reverse switch means you have to rebuy a lot more. I've specifically avoided buying tons and tons of apps on any platform for that simple reason...it becomes much more expensive to switch later on. So even if the music is sort of DRM-free, either inertia or a very large collection of purchased software is going to keep a lot of people on one platform or another for a while. Since Apple charges premiums for new hardware to access this stuff, they're in good shape for a while.
With the new online store model, the store owner is guaranteed a very good chance of long term survival even if their market share drops over time. Microsoft and Adobe are taking it one step further and introducing stuff like Office 365 and Creative Cloud. Previously only large businesses signed month-to-month rental agreements with software companies, and now consumers are being dragged in as well. Guaranteed revenue stream vs. one-time perpetual license.
It's pretty obvious that someone high enough in their business-customer focused product guys heard enough Start button complaints to get that put back. I know a lot of people wanted the menu to return, but that was doubtful given how much Microsoft wants to see the Store and the whole Apps thing succeed.
They have made a lot of tweaks to make using Windows 8.1 on keyboard-and-mouse PCs much easier, and I'm happy for that. One thing that I desperately want back is the "themeable" user interface on the desktop. I'll even give up the Start Menu for that. I want to be able to choose between the new "Windows 2.0" desktop, the "dated and cheesy" Aero Glass theme I like in Win7, or even go all the way back to "Windows Classic" like I've been able to do since Win2K. That's just the in-box themes too -- lots of vendors used the theming code in the OS to completely transform the desktop. I was really hoping for Aero Glass to make a return (or even Aero without the Glass acceleration.) Unfortunately, it looks like they're still not listening to people on that front.
I've seen a lot of Windows "sysadmins" who were beyond lost when the command line came into play, and have worked at a few "Windows only shops" like you describe, but I believe that for the most part, the BYOD thing is denied simply because IT departments can't support it at their current resource levels.
When you open up BYOD beyond a subset that can handle it, it's not just "let Tristan and Kayla in Marketing use their iPads for updating the corporate Twitter feed." Even with official support policies in place, you will run into support problems and get dragged into fixing people's problems. Truly secure BYOD also requires that you re-architect the network and servers such that even internal user LAN/WLAN segments aren't trusted, and that is a big engineering investment, mindset change and equipment purchase for large companies. In a perfect world, BYOD works 100%, it's limited to 40 or 50 tech-savvy users who never need any support, and all devices work with everything you have in the office. In reality, it's 6000 people trying to use Android, iOS, Windows Phone and Mac OS on 100 different devices, and everyone eventually has problems. What works for a Silicon Valley startup doesn't work for a huge established company, unless you do your homework. And corporate IT departments usually aren't known for cutting edge innovation...
As for the command line thing, Windows administrators were put on notice back in Server 2008 R2 that the GUI was going to take a back seat to PowerShell and that companies were likely going to be deploying Server Core in places where they had a full server OS before. In my mind, Server 2008 R2 was the first release that really got PowerShell to the point where it can completely replace the GUI.) If they don't want to learn, I'm sure there's people who will do the work.:-) I'm not a huge PowerShell fan, but I do see the value compared with using VBScript, or worse, batch files as long as you put in the effort to properly design your scripts. Seriously, I've worked in places where I've become "the Linux guy" or "the Mac OS guy" just because I take the minimal effort to be somewhat cross-platform. It's not hard.
OK, there's little doubt that there's a serious cloud bubble going on, and in that context it may seem that IBM just threw away lots of money. But, they have tons of money to begin with. On top of that, SoftLayer is a provider of datacenter space at its core, and I'm sure IBM has customers who need hosted systems.
When you peel off the marketing junk, "cloud" is actually a good thing for a datacenter provider. They get to buy less hardware to support more customers and get it running for them faster, if they know what they're doing. For traditional businesses to adopt it, a middle ground between public cloud and on-site physical servers like this might be the stepping stone they need to move some of the stuff *that makes sense* to a hosting provider.
IBM is a very staid company by nature, so you know they've gone over this deal backwards and forwards and see potential in it. The only downside I see is the one that comes with most US/European acquisitions by IBM. They have a tendency to come in, acquire all the intellectual property, then find every single possible position that can be offshored, resulting in a lot of job loss.
In my opinion, the whole "PCs are dying, everyone will be on tablets and in the cloud by 2017" meme is a little overhyped. It's true that PCs are no longer the only computing devices available, and tablets are definitely getting good enough to replace PCs for most "read only" tasks. However, even with suitable Bluetooth keyboards and other accessories, creating documents and content on a tablet is still very difficult. I'm sure it will continue to be this way until some new UI paradigm pops up like 100% fluent voice recognition, wildly gesturing to type, etc. For writing software, messing with spreadsheets and even playing high end games, PCs still have a place. It's just not 99% of the market anymore. A good example of this is the Surface. It's amazing to have almost a full fledged PC in a tablet form factor and lets you build some really cool applications that the previous Tablet PC form factor didn't address well. But I wouldn't use it to write anything longer than an SMS, tweet or quick email...it's just not built for huge gorilla hands.:-) On the other hand, it's great for watching movies, surfing the web, and other Millenial-approved social media tasks.
Microsoft seems to have missed this fact with Windows 8, probably because they were panicked about Apple and Android dominating the tablet market. Or their marketing department came in and said "zomg Millenials and hipsters are chooing a tablet-first approach to computing, we must capture this market." And that makes sense -- people of a certain age have been raised with Facebook and smartphones, so they're used to it. However, they also have jobs, and probably use PCs and laptops at these jobs to create content. Windows 8.1 appears to be backtracking on their tablet bet a little bit, but not totally -- the Metro "app" ecosystem is here to stay. (As a side note, my primary complaint with Windows 8 was not the Start screen, though it's nice they're bringing the button back -- it was the awful 2-D Windows 2.0 user interface, and it looks like they're not bringing back Aero in Win8.1, so that sucks.)
Microsoft will continue to have decent market share in workplaces. Desktop PCs will most likely fade out as laptops get more powerful, but the idea that the tablet form factor works for every situation is crazy. Even when hardware begins shipping with touch screens by default, some people will prefer not to use them. Windows Server 2012 (and Windows 8 under the hood) are actually very good products. But they do need to listen to corporate customers. How hard would it have been to bring back the classic Start menu for companies who are deploying on desktops and laptops? Why wouldn't you allow your customers who were happy with Windows 7 to keep most of what they liked while having the option to use the new stuff? In my mind, not listening to corporations who buy millions of licenses will make them less relevant, not the rise of the tablet.
Data center consolidations are never easy, and this is most likely being handled by a for-profit contractor, so tack on an extra 20% to whatever price tag it is, just for overhead.
Think of all the stuff that has to happen: - All the connectivity to various networks has to be moved or duplicated. If we're not talking IPsec over the Internet, that means circuit orders, routing changes, etc. which quickly multiply and all involve tons of coordination. - If you're doing P2V, that has to be carefully scheduled and everything needs to be tested on the consolidation hardware before you decommission the old stuff completely. - If you're doing lift-and-move for things that can't or shouldn't be on VMs, downtime, network changes and logistics to get it to the new place need to be coordinated. - All the system dependencies need to be worked out. System X will break without connectivity to Systems S, T and Z. System T will fail intermittently if the latency between System F goes above a certain point, taking down A, B and N. Etc. Etc. Yay for integration.
Also, DC migration plans tend to expose all the skeletons that previous admins left in the closet. Well-worn examples of undocumented networks, networks that unexpectedly rely on some crappy Linksys switch backboning traffic between key segments are par for the course. [1]
My experience from the private sector with consolidations is usually large companies wanting to shovel things that started off in branches up to a central point, or to move IT someplace with a lower cost of living. In every case, it's never paid off right away. The fact that it's the federal government just means they have more real estate at their disposal, so it's a bigger job, not necessarily more or less cost.
[1] My favorite comes from the dark ages of Token Ring where it turned out that the link between two components of a very important, must-be-running system depended on TR gateway software running on an original IBM PC AT with two TR NICs.- and this was in the 90s. It was never meant to be that way, but it turned out that someone never documented this and it was found during a move.
One of the things this might do is increase the completion rate of the engineering courses without having to dumb down instruction.
Back when I was in college (measured in geological time units,) I started off in chemical engineering due to a fascination with engineering and a good prep in chemistry. What I didn't have was (and still is) a good math background. I know people who "get" math learn it differently from the rote memorization method taught in most schools, and this makes it make more sense. I was a memorizer -- I'd love to know the secret to actually understanding math. Anyway, it became clear to me after a year and a half that I was never going to be able to keep up with the coursework because of my lousy math background and full time employment. Most people I knew who washed out of engineering switched to business - I tried that for a semester, found it incredibly easy and boring, and switched to chemistry. So you could say I succeeded, in that I got a degree in something marketable, but I still lacked the tools to pursue what I was interested in.
It's awful that universities have to do a "remedial year" to fix shortcomings in K-12, and I wasn't even a low income student who went to a crappy school. But looking at it from the perspective of someone who may have benefited from something like this, it makes a little sense. I think that if I hadn't had to learn calculus at the same time I was doing physics and other intro engineering courses, I may have had a better chance of actually understanding what was going on. Once you go beyond the basics and start dealing with thermodynamics, dynamics, etc., not having that foundation kills your ability to fully master the material. The problem with a program like this is that they have to find people who have skills deficiencies AND are willing to put in the hard work to correct them quickly.
Maybe I'm getting a little older, but I think a major problem that any education reform can't solve is the lack of a diverse group of jobs for people of varying abilities. Previously, high school dropouts had a hard life, but they weren't sentenced to a lifetime of poverty like they are now. The reason is that there were jobs for them, and some of these jobs actually had stability and wage progression. High school graduates could go and work in a factory, and in some cases, they would have stable income and the ability to live a middle class life. Smarter high school grads and the low-to-middle achieving college graduates had their pick of millions of corporate paper-pushing jobs. The good college grads and post-graduate degree holders had even more choices open to them.
The current situation isn't sustainable: - High school dropouts have nothing to look forward to in life - they will always be either unemployed or making minimum wage in a string of temporary jobs. Low skilled jobs used to be protected by strong unions, but public opinion has soured on them. - Factory work is much less plentiful than it used to be. In fact, there are articles citing the lack of skills for current manufacturing jobs (which I genuinely don't understand, but apparently the only people left in a factory are CNC programmers -- does anyone know the real source of this skill shortage? Is everything done by robots now?) - There's less corporate paper to push and entry level positions are increasingly being outsourced or eliminated. This leaves tons of people with college degrees, high student debt and no way to pay it back. Example: I used to work in the IT department of a huge insurance company and my older colleagues told me about a time where they had many thousands of people just processing claims, keeping the books, etc. That's mostly gone now. - There's even pressure on professions like law and medicine -- apparently outsourcing has killed the market for a lot of legal jobs.
The problem is, anyone who advocates having enough employment for everyone at every level is branded a socialist or Luddite. I can't see it getting better until there really is a "1%" of people who have a good life and we have a repeat of the French Revolution.
Sure, we should fix problems with education. But we should also realize that not everyone benefits from more education and can't handle anything beyond a basic job. A janitor shouldn't make the same as a doctor or engineer, but that janitor should at least have some stability in their life. I grew up in the Rust Belt, and it wasn't uncommon for people to graduate high school, and spend the next 40 years at a steel mill or car plant. Those people weren't rich, but the stability of the work meant they could have a few nice things and be solidly middle class even without an expensive education.
All I'm saying is that producing millions of college graduates for a class of work that doesn't fit them or doesn't exist isn't the fix. The conservative ideal of entrepreneurship for all is also silly -- millions of failed business ventures can't be supported by the economy any more than millions of unemployed employees. I say the Rust Belt model is a good one.
There are two things that really bug me about this story and stories like this:
- (Obviously) The employer wasn't able to effectively lock the former employee out of the system
- Because of idiots like this (assuming he did it,) IT will never be considered a profession
One of the things I would really like to see before I retire is the ability of IT / systems engineering to grow up a little bit and attain the same level of recognition that professional engineers enjoy. I'm old and curmudgeon-y at 38, but one of the things I've consistently seen throughout my career is examples of stuff like this. When standards are put in place (see ITIL as an example,) they are implemented so poorly or are so rigid that they remove any critical thinking from a process. I know many support people in ITIL shops who have quit out of the sheer frustration of paperwork and being limited to pushing pre-defined buttons at pre-defined times. This kills the pipeline for new engineering talent, and we're increasingly at the mercy of high-paid vendors and vendor consultants. In my opinion, this needs to change.
The problem is, how do we do it? A basic engineering education has math, physics, mechanics, thermodynamics, etc, to fall back on. The fundamentals in these subjects change very rarely. Let's say for the moment that "IT" represents the computer systems engineering field, even though I know the term encompasses tons of technician roles. When you dig down into the fundamentals of IT, you're dealing with the interoperability of computer systems, networks, storage, and so on. The concepts are all the same, but the layers on top keep getting changed every few months as new technology comes out. In many cases, old technology gets trotted out again with new underpinnings attached -- see the rise of virtualization and the parallels to the 70's timeshare concept. Sometimes it's change for the sake of change (and a cut of the App Store pie) -- see Windows 8. The field is definitely not static, but neither is engineering. New methods and materials are tried all the time, and if one works better it displaces the old one.
One thing an engineering curriculum that leads to the possibility of PE licensure has is an ethics component. Sure, some people may consider it a joke, and think following ethical guidelines is for suckers when executives get away with things all the time. But, it's there. IT as it is now doesn't really have something like this. How many sysadmins do you know that behave like a slightly less criminal version of the BOFH? I've seen a lot of this behavior, and there's very little done to combat it. Because I'm an ethical idiot, I point out things like the loopholes this guy probably exploited to get his revenge. I've often walked into situations where I've been accidentally granted way too much authority. I don't know about you, but my first reaction isn't to exploit it -- I've politely explained, "Look, I know I can do xyz with my privileges, but I really shouldn't be able to. Please take this away from me." Why? Because I really like the work I do, and I want to keep doing it. The guy in this article is going to be lucky to have any sort of job, let alone work in the IT field again, even if he's found not guilty.
I know that a lot of the problems with education rest with the fact that we trust vendors and their certifications to fill the gap in fundamental knowledge. I absolutely hate vendor "whitepapers" that promise a "deep dive" on a technical subject and are thinly veiled advertisements for a product. Having only that as an educational resource leads to people who have a very vendor-centric view of the world. My natural reaction when faced with an unfamiliar system is to dig in to the details and figure out what's going on under the hood. Vendors don't want you to do that, and employers are happy because the vendor they chose just happens to certify "professionals" who "know" the product in question.
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Gartner, Forrester, etc. are the bane of my existence in IT, because they promote magical thinking among executives, but this time they're right about something.
No one is prepared to deal with the dirty little secret of the information age -- that there are going to be huge swaths of the population who will be out of work, with no prospects for future employment. The last time around, it was low-skilled factory workers. Now it's the middle class's turn! And when half the country has no money and no work, they're going to get angry.
I don't think the current generation of office workers is really thinking about how much less of them will be needed once companies get around to squeezing every single nickel out of every single business process. It's already happening on a huge scale, even in the IT sector. Anything rules-based is basically fair game for automation. Think back a couple of decades -- how many millions of bookkeepers, accountants, secretaries, low-level report-consolidation managers, etc. did large companies employ and pay a decent middle class salary to? Each one of those went out and bought those large companies' products, bought houses, cars and vacations. Now that strong base of consumers is disappearing, or they need to finance their purchases through debt because their wages don't keep up. Large numbers of corporate jobs can still be summed up as "I look at reports from this location, perform a few calculations and summarize the resulting numbers for my management by emailing them a spreadsheet." No one can tell me that the accountants haven't noticed this...
The vast majority of people in the middle class, in my opinion, are averse to social welfare policies simply because they don't think anything bad is ever going to happen to them. Worse, they think that if they support the richest people and just try really hard, they'll eventually be rich themselves. This thinking is going to backfire hard on them when their nice safe job is automated or no longer needed. For example, the most vocal opinions of the new healthcare law in the US are typically middle class families who get their insurance coverage through work and have never had to worry about not having it. Try explaining to them that there are a significant number of working individuals who can't afford insurance and you get, "But...but...socialism!!" All I can say is the next few years will be very interesting. If you believe the Star Trek TNG writers, it's going to take a massive upheaval to get to a post-scarcity utopia.
The only long-term "stability" I've seen lately isn't even really stability -- it's contract work. I'm still an FTE simply because I have a family and don't want a divorce because I'm travelling around the country 300 days a year. But, I have many people I've worked with who have quite the lifestyle simply because they make multiples of a typical full time salary by stitching contract jobs together. It's amazing to me that a company doesn't hire permanent staff because it's "so expensive' and then turns around and hires contractors at $150+ an hour, who basically work the same 40 hour schedule. The downsides are that you basically have to run a business as well as do your actual job, and from what people have told me, the travel really drains you after a while. Favorite comment from a consultant friend of mine, "That first class seat on the plane doesn't make much difference when you're sleeping the whole flight because you're dead tired." (I disagree, I'm 6'2" and coach travel is awful...)
The real secret is to make your own stability, and the problem is that it takes lots of self control. You need to pay off your house, not buy crap you can't afford if you lose your job, and save money both for now and for later. Being unemployed sucks, but being unemployed AND having creditors knocking on the door is worse. I'm a big stability fan too, and I tend to choose employers who are also stable, but these days you can never tell.
One of the things that might change things a little bit in the stability department is the whole healthcare reform thing. A lot of people I know are basically trapped in full time employment because they or their family member has some medical problem that makes getting private insurance unworkable. Even if you have to pay full price for a plan from the insurance companies, (a) you'll actually get coverage, and (b) hopefully the cost will be closer to the group rates large employers get.
Software or IT work will eventually lose its salary advantage, but I think things might be better if various factions in the IT field come together and actually make it a branch of "real" engineering or a profession, with the same education requirements and barriers to entry that other professions have.
A-L has been going down the tubes for quite a while. It's pretty amazing to think that part of the company used to be the mighty Bell Labs. You know, Unix, the transistor, one of the last corporate-funded basic research institutes... It kind of makes me want to have the old AT&T monopoly back just to have that.
Admittedly, they probably do have huge legacy costs in the form of less productive employees and products that don't make them as much money anymore. Also, the telecom landscape has changed a lot over the years. I work for a similar company, and while our group works on newish stuff, there's a ton of older products just sitting around that used to be very high margin and no longer have the revenue to support their costs.
That said, it's never good when an older, established company suddenly announces a monster layoff like this. In the older companies, you just know it's going to be 10,000 58-year-olds in the developed countries who will suddenly find themselves out of work with zero prospects for new employment, hanging on until Social Security kicks in. That's the sad part of these "smartsizings" -- when you're just a number in a spreadsheet, companies have no idea how much you still have to offer in terms of talent and experience. I'm approaching the ripe old age of 40 now, and am constantly staying on top of all the new stuff just to keep the skill set sharp. That's one thing I could do without in the IT "profession" -- so much new buzzwordy stuff is rehashes of technology decades old with better supporting technology. Too bad Gartner and their ilk are the only ones that CIOs listen to!
I saw the first post was "what's so special about a company changing their collaboration software?" Allow the old man here from simpler times to explain. :-)
The reason why it's a big shift is because, at this point, Notes is beyond legacy status when it comes to email/collaboration apps. I don't know how much success Whirlpool will have with Google Apps, but I imagine their users will be happier. For anyone in the IT business in the early/mid 90s and forward, especially if you worked for an IBM shop, you probably have had some exposure to Lotus (now IBM) Notes. My company is still a Notes customer, most probably because of a sweetheart licensing deal or just inertia (I work in our product engineering group, corporate IT is handled separately in my company.) Notes was one of the first "groupware" applications, and companies built huge, complex applications for it. (Oh yeah, I forgot, that's the other reason we're still Notes customers -- rewriting the few remaining mission critical apps with tons of mystical business logic embedded in them hasn't been done yet.) Anyway, email was just another application, and it was never Notes' strong suit. One thing it did have that was very important for 90s era road warriors dialing up from the middle of nowhere was the ability to truly work offline and replicate messages when you had the chance. Outlook only got good at this around 2003, so Notes also had a pretty big following in consulting shops and places that had a lot of disconnected or poorly connected locations. Remember, kiddies, when Notes got its start, the Internet was still an academic exercise and as early as 1998 or so, slow dial up was the norm. That's the environment Notes was built to run in.
Anyway, IBM has been keeping Notes on life support for ages ,along with Lotus Symphony which it inherited when it bought Lotus. The latest clients have almost completely been rewritten in Java with some native front end code, and it's very slow. One thing Microsoft has done a pretty good job with is the Outlook/Exchange combo in terms of user responsiveness. But Notes still has some of the 90s look and feel in it, and it really seems like they gave the recent client upgrade project to a bunch of new grads in India (which, given that it's IBM, isn't a shocker.)
Notes is a good lesson in what happens when a formerly decent software product gets ignored for a long time -- a sort of "software rot" slowly sets in and competitors just keep adding new stuff while you stand still. MS Office isn't exactly the same thing -- they're constantly bloating it with new stuff; not really standing still the way IBM has done with Notes.
It'll be interesting to see how quickly Office 365, Adobe Creative Cloud and Google Apps are taken up by businesses. It'll sure change the landscape for IT guys -- lots of my "professional" colleagues who rely on knowing strange obscure software features over systems engineering work are going to be very surprised one day when companies are just renting applications and need fewer in house people to feed them. I've seen this coming for a while and have been preparing -- even if the whole thing fizzles out, it's good to be multi-talented.
See my other comment -- your argument holds water only if we allow the current black market to continue with the criminal penalties removed.
If someone were able to walk into a store and buy absolutely pure meth (for example) the following costs disappear:
- Many of the health costs (ingesting a pure substance synthesized by a drug company vs. one contaminated with very toxic solvents)
- Many of the criminal costs -- (1) it would be cheaper, meaning you might not have to steal to feed your habit, (2) transactions would be in the open, not controlled by organized crime or random drug dealers, (3) you wouldn't have to waste resources throwing people in jail.
- Random houses out in the country getting blown up because of a poor understanding of organic solvent extraction chemistry
Yes, you're going to have other consequences, but they're all better than what we have now. And, they can be counteracted. There are plenty of rehab facilities for people who want to get clean, and funding those beats funding prisons to warehouse people that will just keep coming back.
Treat every drug like alcohol and tobacco -- regulate it, tax it, and use the proceeds to clean up the rest of the problems associated with its use. We already fund methadone clinics for heroin addicts -- that's not just for fun; it's a cost we've chosen to take on in exchange for more controlled addicts and a lower rate of IV drug-borne diseases.
An interesting side point that comes out of all this is that services like Silk Road wouldn't exist if there wasn't a market for them.
I'm about as far from Libertarian as you can get, but one thing I do think they have right is the idea that the "war on drugs" should be stopped. It can't be won, that has been proven. Every single defense that's put up to stop drug trafficking is worked around shortly after it comes on the scene. Drug cartels basically run large parts of Mexico and Central America. US citizens get tossed in prison for drug use and sales, which basically turns them into a wasted resource (good luck getting a normal job with a prison record) and this ends up costing more in the long run.
Prohibition basically gave birth to organized crime, simply because enough of the population wanted to keep drinking alcohol and was willing to break the law. As a result, we saw what we see now with other drugs -- the price of alcohol shot up, other ancillary crime increased, violent gangs brutally wiped each other out neighborhood by neighborhood in big cities. With drugs it's the same thing -- I have no desire to use drugs, but there are plenty of others who do. And they'll do whatever it takes to do so, and pay whatever street price is prevalent. Econ 101 -- inelastic demand (more like infinite demand) in the face of constrained supply means prices keep going up no matter what you do.
I believe drug use is a completely victimless crime -- it's the other stuff that happens alongside it (stealing to pay for expensive drugs, drunk/high driving, etc.). If everything were readily available, sold in safe doses and taxed appropriately (like tobacco and alcohol,) prices would be low and people wouldn't have to steal to pay for their habits.
The other thing to consider is that we're rapidly heading towards a sci-fi dystopian future where human labor is no longer as important as it is now. When the unemployment rate shoots up to 85%, wouldn't you rather fill their free time with something other than random crime sprees? Yes, it sounds very "Brave New World"-ish, but it's rapidly coming true. Unless society just drops the use of labor and money as measures of productivity, which will never happen, this is the inevitable future!
Didn't Nortel have "accounting irregularities" to deal with as well?
Other than that, it sounds familiar. If I remember correctly, Nortel overextended themselves during the dotcom boom, and didn't have anything to fall back on once people stopped buying networking gear. I think IBM got most of their patents -- there's a separate company that makes network switches for their blade systems.
I think Sun did something similar also -- too much overspending in the dotcom days, then people stopped buying expensive Unix servers.
In all reality, this private equity firm is probably going to strip all the remaining assets from BlackBerry and kill the company, but being out of the limelight is the best thing for a company in this situation to do.
When a company is publicly traded, you can _maybe_ get it to agree to changes that pay off in 1 or 2 quarters. The stock analysts and CNBC idiots make it so that every time the CEO goes to the bathroom is scrutinized for any shred of news. Anything beyond that 2-quarter limit just can't be done. Anything that involves tough decisions that affect share price can't be done either. BlackBerry needs that kind of time out of the public eye to fix the problems they have. It's too bad also -- because we're stuck in the position of having our retirements dependent on the fickle stock market (those of us without pensions, that is.) I think that if the stock market went back to being a rich man's club, and we didn't have entire news organizations waiting to pounce on every utterance that company executives make, the funding picture for companies would be much better. Look at how much negative press BlackBerry has endured -- no matter what they do, every news outlet says "they suck." Gee, why can't we keep the share price up? Why isn't anyone ignoring the advice and investing?
I echo the sentiments of others in this thread though -- Microsoft would be stupid to not buy the patents they have, and they could even fold the secure messaging stuff into Exchange.
One problem that IT folks often come across, especially with development jobs and especially at startups, is the expectation that long hours produce better results. Large companies also do this -- Google, Microsoft, etc. have on-site everything as a perk for employees, but also to keep them there for the maximum possible time. This works very well when you're just out of college -- you're used to working long hours to finish stuff, the dorm-like atmosphere is inviting, etc. But it really gets old when you're older, more established and have things outside of work like a marriage, family, etc.
Also, employers hate to add staff in IT roles because most of them see the entire function as a necessary evil. If you're in one of these places, you'll never get free of being called to fix stuff out of hours and working like crazy to put out fires. On top of that, many see themselves as "great places to work" and don't think that their workers feel any of this pain.
The one common myth throughout IT employment is that every place is like this. It isn't -- I happen to work for a place that allows flexible hours. And although we're lean in the staffing department and often have to work *a little* extra time, the workload isn't crushing. There are trade-offs, and people who work here know them. Pay isn't at the top of the range, the stuff we work on is typically not cutting edge (but not ancient either,) and the work our department does (systems integration) is very difficult if you don't have the right attitude/mindset/troubleshooting brain. In addition, those flexible hours get cashed in for marathon work sessions on very rare occasions. My company basically says "keep sane hours, make sure you're around for meetings, and we reserve the right to fly you halfway across the world if a disaster happens." I could get a job working myself to death for an investment bank or video game company, but I have a family at home now.
Seriously, not everywhere has a toxic culture. And yes, I'm aware that there are a lot of people who love working insane hours and have very little to do outside of work. That's why different companies have different work styles.
Hmmm, with mainstream Intel platforms approaching the power savings of SoCs, maybe Microsoft should drop the other shoe and kill off RT. If standard Windows will run acceptably on these devices, there's no reason to keep RT going!
One of the things I've never understood about these privatization deals is that people think it will save taxpayers tons of money. The simple truth is that some public goods should be provided by non-profit or state-owned companies simply to maintain the level of service.
An example from the US is the Postal Service vs. FedEx, UPS, etc. The private delivery services have squeezed every single nickel out of the process of delivering packages, and one of the ways they do this is cherry-picking the easy services to perform. They also charge a lot of money for this service unless you're a big company with a better contracted rate. Anyone can get a package from New York to Atlanta overnight . It's very different when an organization has a mandate to provide affordable delivery of letters from anywhere to anywhere in the US for the cost of a stamp. I can mail a letter from Key West, Florida to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska for 46 cents - that doesn't even cover the fuel required. FedEx and UPS don't directly deliver to areas of the country where it's not cost-effective to do so. The Postal Service has a Constitutional mandate to do this, so it has to be inefficient by nature. Since I'm not a business, I usually use the USPS to ship stuff just because the walk-up rates are way cheaper than FedEx, and now they even offer cheaper rates if you pre-pay the postage online. The USPS is under pressure to keep these rates low, has a huge workforce to pay, and has a congressional mandate to prepay their retiree medical and pension costs
There's plenty of other examples. Electric and gas utilities have to provide service at a cheap enough rate so almost anyone can afford it. Amtrak in the US has to run very unprofitable long-distance rail service and subsidize it by using the money it makes from its Northeast and California rail services.
The other thing to consider is employment. Especially now, given the fact that suitable jobs for the majority of the population are going away with no replacement work on the horizon, we need to find something for people to do. A privatized postal service will lay off everyone but the bare minimum number of people to keep the lights on, and outsource all the business processes to cheaper countries in the name of cost savings. This is where my "lefty socialist" tendencies kick in - Do we really want a world where 5% of the population are fabulously wealthy, 15% are working in jobs like IT, engineering, and others, and 80% have nothing to do and no prospects? Remember, the seismic shifts in employment last time generated better jobs. Subsistence farming went to organized agriculture, then mechanization of that caused a shift to factory work, then outsourcing of that caused a shift to service and paper-pushing jobs, now outsourcing and obsolescence of that leads to.....hmm....there's nothing for Joe Average to do anymore and a well-protected aristocracy with no incentive to help. That's a recipe for French Revolution 2.0.
I know economic theory isn't on my side, but I think monopolies are more efficient at delivering some types of services than others -- not from a dollar perspective but from a service delivery perspective. It may be more expensive, but think back to how reliable AT&T phone service was back before they were broken up. It was expensive, but it almost never went down. Obviously this doesn't apply to all goods and services, but those that have to be universal and cheap are not good candidates for privatization IMO.
I've worked in a few different settings in my career, and there's no denying the fact that there is a subset of the "IT crowd" that is described quite well by the show of the same name. Reasons can be debated for ages, and there are lots of theories -- lack of exposure to appropriate models of behavior, the silly "brogrammer" meme, etc. etc. etc. But the fact is that people like this who can't keep that side of them from showing and even coming through in their work make it impossible for IT to ever graduate to a "professional" field.
Some stereotypes (and actual real world examples I've seen) of IT folks would have you thinking that there are no people in the field who are married or who have normal relationships, have kids, etc. I can't tell you how many IT people I've met who have Asian mail-order brides and other not-normal relationship patterns. But there are a lot of us who wouldn't dream of getting up on stage and demoing an app like these guys made. Not because we're Puritans, or PC, or whatever, but because it's rude. I'm married and have two kids, one of whom is a girl. Normal relationships aren't compatible with being the drooling idiot in the strip club.
That said, I am aware that there's a difference between IT in an established company and the startup culture, especially in software development. I don't know what it is, but it's similar to the culture of sales organizations. Startups have a unique mix of type-A fraternity types with development nerds, and that culture creates a pretty big echo chamber for behavior like this.
Look at the very public examples of this kind of behavior in the last few years -- this thing, the "Twitter shaming" of a couple of nerds making a stupid joke at a conference, and this thing that totally boggles my mind. The behavior is surprising, but so is some of the reaction to it. It ranges from "that's really stupid" to "F you, PC police. If you're offended, I don't care."
I'm well aware that everyone has a right to free speech. But the IT industry will never shed its stereotype of being the nerds in the basement if we continue to allow things like this to be what the management class associates with us.
It's not good, but it's not our problem and it shouldn't be. So yes, in this case we should ignore it.
History shows that our intervention in this part of the world is disastrous, without exceptions. No matter who you back, or whatever justification you give, nothing will prevent one side of the conflict from getting angry that you're helping the other side. Not to mention that Syria is a sovereign country regardless of who's in charge now, so just walking in and invading because you're capable isn't going to be looked on favorably. We didn't win any friends invading Iraq or Afghanistan.
I'm a big believer in not trying to solve unfixable problems. You just end up pouring money and resources into a problem that will never go away. See the 20th century "containment" wars in Vietnam and Korea as well as the "war on drugs" and prohibition for examples of this.
Here we go again...
This has been going on for decades in this part of the world. "The only winning move is not to play."
Tell me again why we should care about the use of chemical weapons in Syria? I don't see a reason to intervene.
Another good point. But here's another (IMHO) good point. :-)
Pension funds are invested for the incredibly long term. A brand-new employee's contributions have 30-40 years to grow in some cases. That's a lot of time to fix screw-ups and smooth out any volatility. The pensioner may not maximize their returns the same way they would if they had invested on their own, but they are guaranteed a payout at the end. Due to lack of education, I've heard of a lot of retirees who lost huge chunks of their nest egg around 2008 because they were too aggressive on stocks. Pension recipients don't have to worry (except about the company going bankrupt or ditching the pension plan.) They'll be getting regular checks every month until they die, while unlucky or uneducated self-investors have to change their lives based on the whims of the incredibly high speed market. And if those same retirees want some stability, their only choice is to buy a very expensive annuity with whatever they have left when retirement day comes.
I agree that people need financial education, but I do think that the stock market is not something that Average Joe should be forced to put their money in if they want to be something other than broke when they retire. Didn't George Carlin say something like "Think of how dumb the average person is, then think about how half of the people are dumber than that"? I don't mean to sound elitist or snobby, but most people just don't have the capability to understand this stuff. If they did, no one would carry a balance on a credit card, take out a payday loan, or bounce a check. Why force someone to make decisions that affect whether they're destitute or rich when they die? If they can't handle their personal day to day finances, long term planning is impossible to grasp!
Forcing everyone's retirement into stocks makes companies stop caring about the future beyond next quarter and fuels the CNBC idiots whipping up a frenzy over the tiniest scrap of market news.
"I think this is a terrible problem with education in America. People are afraid of the market, don't understand it, don't want to understand it, but that's due to simple lack of education. And it's important to know the basics, since it will likely affect your standard of living in retirement."
I agree, but I can also see the other side of it. Way back before technology made it possible to do day trading or HFT, it was actually a market that most educated people could get their heads around. And if you're a Buffett-style "value investor" who picks good companies and hangs onto stocks for a long time, a lot of the noise is still filtered out. But, I do think that online trading, instant access to information and cheap trades contribute to volatility. Volatility filters back to the average investor in the form of their account balance wildly swinging up and down for reasons that aren't 100% clear to them.
Some examples:
Investment buy decision process, old school: "Hmm, the WSJ basically reprinted an IBM press release showing new and exciting products. I think I will buy 100 shares of the company and see where it goes. I will call my broker in the morning and pay $100 in fees, then I will own and hold these shares to see if they increase in value."
Investment buy decision process, new school: "OMG, my trading platform's tech sector chart just blinked a brighter shade of green, looks like IBM is in play. Click, buy 100 shares IBM, 85 shares CSCO, 62 shares MSFT, 90 shares RHAT all for $7.95 or free if I trade hundreds of times a month."
Investment sell decision process, old school: "Hmm. the WSJ article I just read says IBM isn't keeping up with competitors. I've made a bit of money on this over the last 10 years, time to sell. Let's call the broker in the morning and maybe I'll do some research on where else to put the profits."
Investment sell decision process, new school: "OMG, IBM missed their quarterly earnings by one cent. Wow, they suck. Sell sell sell! Twitter, "OMG, #IBM is #toast, get out now!!!!!' Stock message boards, "Smart money is in Cisco." Facebook: "Selling my IBM shares now, suggest you do the same." Wow, IBM is down 25% for the day, I wonder why?
If I were running a company that didn't need access to capital that only the stock market would bring, I'd never go public even if it meant Easy Street for me forever. Once a company does that, they will NEVER have control over anything they do.
One of the issues with all the "media marketplaces" like iTunes, Google Play and yes, the MS Store, is that they're not going to disappear anytime soon. I'm not sure how many people are going to abandon an entire app platform once they've sunk a lot of money into it. Before the smartphone era, changing phone carriers meant that you would have to rebuy a few ringtones and other carrier specific stuff, but an Apple to Android or reverse switch means you have to rebuy a lot more. I've specifically avoided buying tons and tons of apps on any platform for that simple reason...it becomes much more expensive to switch later on. So even if the music is sort of DRM-free, either inertia or a very large collection of purchased software is going to keep a lot of people on one platform or another for a while. Since Apple charges premiums for new hardware to access this stuff, they're in good shape for a while.
With the new online store model, the store owner is guaranteed a very good chance of long term survival even if their market share drops over time. Microsoft and Adobe are taking it one step further and introducing stuff like Office 365 and Creative Cloud. Previously only large businesses signed month-to-month rental agreements with software companies, and now consumers are being dragged in as well. Guaranteed revenue stream vs. one-time perpetual license.
It's pretty obvious that someone high enough in their business-customer focused product guys heard enough Start button complaints to get that put back. I know a lot of people wanted the menu to return, but that was doubtful given how much Microsoft wants to see the Store and the whole Apps thing succeed.
They have made a lot of tweaks to make using Windows 8.1 on keyboard-and-mouse PCs much easier, and I'm happy for that. One thing that I desperately want back is the "themeable" user interface on the desktop. I'll even give up the Start Menu for that. I want to be able to choose between the new "Windows 2.0" desktop, the "dated and cheesy" Aero Glass theme I like in Win7, or even go all the way back to "Windows Classic" like I've been able to do since Win2K. That's just the in-box themes too -- lots of vendors used the theming code in the OS to completely transform the desktop. I was really hoping for Aero Glass to make a return (or even Aero without the Glass acceleration.) Unfortunately, it looks like they're still not listening to people on that front.
I've seen a lot of Windows "sysadmins" who were beyond lost when the command line came into play, and have worked at a few "Windows only shops" like you describe, but I believe that for the most part, the BYOD thing is denied simply because IT departments can't support it at their current resource levels.
When you open up BYOD beyond a subset that can handle it, it's not just "let Tristan and Kayla in Marketing use their iPads for updating the corporate Twitter feed." Even with official support policies in place, you will run into support problems and get dragged into fixing people's problems. Truly secure BYOD also requires that you re-architect the network and servers such that even internal user LAN/WLAN segments aren't trusted, and that is a big engineering investment, mindset change and equipment purchase for large companies. In a perfect world, BYOD works 100%, it's limited to 40 or 50 tech-savvy users who never need any support, and all devices work with everything you have in the office. In reality, it's 6000 people trying to use Android, iOS, Windows Phone and Mac OS on 100 different devices, and everyone eventually has problems. What works for a Silicon Valley startup doesn't work for a huge established company, unless you do your homework. And corporate IT departments usually aren't known for cutting edge innovation...
As for the command line thing, Windows administrators were put on notice back in Server 2008 R2 that the GUI was going to take a back seat to PowerShell and that companies were likely going to be deploying Server Core in places where they had a full server OS before. In my mind, Server 2008 R2 was the first release that really got PowerShell to the point where it can completely replace the GUI.) If they don't want to learn, I'm sure there's people who will do the work. :-) I'm not a huge PowerShell fan, but I do see the value compared with using VBScript, or worse, batch files as long as you put in the effort to properly design your scripts. Seriously, I've worked in places where I've become "the Linux guy" or "the Mac OS guy" just because I take the minimal effort to be somewhat cross-platform. It's not hard.
OK, there's little doubt that there's a serious cloud bubble going on, and in that context it may seem that IBM just threw away lots of money. But, they have tons of money to begin with. On top of that, SoftLayer is a provider of datacenter space at its core, and I'm sure IBM has customers who need hosted systems.
When you peel off the marketing junk, "cloud" is actually a good thing for a datacenter provider. They get to buy less hardware to support more customers and get it running for them faster, if they know what they're doing. For traditional businesses to adopt it, a middle ground between public cloud and on-site physical servers like this might be the stepping stone they need to move some of the stuff *that makes sense* to a hosting provider.
IBM is a very staid company by nature, so you know they've gone over this deal backwards and forwards and see potential in it. The only downside I see is the one that comes with most US/European acquisitions by IBM. They have a tendency to come in, acquire all the intellectual property, then find every single possible position that can be offshored, resulting in a lot of job loss.
In my opinion, the whole "PCs are dying, everyone will be on tablets and in the cloud by 2017" meme is a little overhyped. It's true that PCs are no longer the only computing devices available, and tablets are definitely getting good enough to replace PCs for most "read only" tasks. However, even with suitable Bluetooth keyboards and other accessories, creating documents and content on a tablet is still very difficult. I'm sure it will continue to be this way until some new UI paradigm pops up like 100% fluent voice recognition, wildly gesturing to type, etc. For writing software, messing with spreadsheets and even playing high end games, PCs still have a place. It's just not 99% of the market anymore. A good example of this is the Surface. It's amazing to have almost a full fledged PC in a tablet form factor and lets you build some really cool applications that the previous Tablet PC form factor didn't address well. But I wouldn't use it to write anything longer than an SMS, tweet or quick email...it's just not built for huge gorilla hands. :-) On the other hand, it's great for watching movies, surfing the web, and other Millenial-approved social media tasks.
Microsoft seems to have missed this fact with Windows 8, probably because they were panicked about Apple and Android dominating the tablet market. Or their marketing department came in and said "zomg Millenials and hipsters are chooing a tablet-first approach to computing, we must capture this market." And that makes sense -- people of a certain age have been raised with Facebook and smartphones, so they're used to it. However, they also have jobs, and probably use PCs and laptops at these jobs to create content. Windows 8.1 appears to be backtracking on their tablet bet a little bit, but not totally -- the Metro "app" ecosystem is here to stay. (As a side note, my primary complaint with Windows 8 was not the Start screen, though it's nice they're bringing the button back -- it was the awful 2-D Windows 2.0 user interface, and it looks like they're not bringing back Aero in Win8.1, so that sucks.)
Microsoft will continue to have decent market share in workplaces. Desktop PCs will most likely fade out as laptops get more powerful, but the idea that the tablet form factor works for every situation is crazy. Even when hardware begins shipping with touch screens by default, some people will prefer not to use them. Windows Server 2012 (and Windows 8 under the hood) are actually very good products. But they do need to listen to corporate customers. How hard would it have been to bring back the classic Start menu for companies who are deploying on desktops and laptops? Why wouldn't you allow your customers who were happy with Windows 7 to keep most of what they liked while having the option to use the new stuff? In my mind, not listening to corporations who buy millions of licenses will make them less relevant, not the rise of the tablet.
Data center consolidations are never easy, and this is most likely being handled by a for-profit contractor, so tack on an extra 20% to whatever price tag it is, just for overhead.
Think of all the stuff that has to happen:
- All the connectivity to various networks has to be moved or duplicated. If we're not talking IPsec over the Internet, that means circuit orders, routing changes, etc. which quickly multiply and all involve tons of coordination.
- If you're doing P2V, that has to be carefully scheduled and everything needs to be tested on the consolidation hardware before you decommission the old stuff completely.
- If you're doing lift-and-move for things that can't or shouldn't be on VMs, downtime, network changes and logistics to get it to the new place need to be coordinated.
- All the system dependencies need to be worked out. System X will break without connectivity to Systems S, T and Z. System T will fail intermittently if the latency between System F goes above a certain point, taking down A, B and N. Etc. Etc. Yay for integration.
Also, DC migration plans tend to expose all the skeletons that previous admins left in the closet. Well-worn examples of undocumented networks, networks that unexpectedly rely on some crappy Linksys switch backboning traffic between key segments are par for the course. [1]
My experience from the private sector with consolidations is usually large companies wanting to shovel things that started off in branches up to a central point, or to move IT someplace with a lower cost of living. In every case, it's never paid off right away. The fact that it's the federal government just means they have more real estate at their disposal, so it's a bigger job, not necessarily more or less cost.
[1] My favorite comes from the dark ages of Token Ring where it turned out that the link between two components of a very important, must-be-running system depended on TR gateway software running on an original IBM PC AT with two TR NICs.- and this was in the 90s. It was never meant to be that way, but it turned out that someone never documented this and it was found during a move.
One of the things this might do is increase the completion rate of the engineering courses without having to dumb down instruction.
Back when I was in college (measured in geological time units,) I started off in chemical engineering due to a fascination with engineering and a good prep in chemistry. What I didn't have was (and still is) a good math background. I know people who "get" math learn it differently from the rote memorization method taught in most schools, and this makes it make more sense. I was a memorizer -- I'd love to know the secret to actually understanding math. Anyway, it became clear to me after a year and a half that I was never going to be able to keep up with the coursework because of my lousy math background and full time employment. Most people I knew who washed out of engineering switched to business - I tried that for a semester, found it incredibly easy and boring, and switched to chemistry. So you could say I succeeded, in that I got a degree in something marketable, but I still lacked the tools to pursue what I was interested in.
It's awful that universities have to do a "remedial year" to fix shortcomings in K-12, and I wasn't even a low income student who went to a crappy school. But looking at it from the perspective of someone who may have benefited from something like this, it makes a little sense. I think that if I hadn't had to learn calculus at the same time I was doing physics and other intro engineering courses, I may have had a better chance of actually understanding what was going on. Once you go beyond the basics and start dealing with thermodynamics, dynamics, etc., not having that foundation kills your ability to fully master the material. The problem with a program like this is that they have to find people who have skills deficiencies AND are willing to put in the hard work to correct them quickly.
Maybe I'm getting a little older, but I think a major problem that any education reform can't solve is the lack of a diverse group of jobs for people of varying abilities. Previously, high school dropouts had a hard life, but they weren't sentenced to a lifetime of poverty like they are now. The reason is that there were jobs for them, and some of these jobs actually had stability and wage progression. High school graduates could go and work in a factory, and in some cases, they would have stable income and the ability to live a middle class life. Smarter high school grads and the low-to-middle achieving college graduates had their pick of millions of corporate paper-pushing jobs. The good college grads and post-graduate degree holders had even more choices open to them.
The current situation isn't sustainable:
- High school dropouts have nothing to look forward to in life - they will always be either unemployed or making minimum wage in a string of temporary jobs. Low skilled jobs used to be protected by strong unions, but public opinion has soured on them.
- Factory work is much less plentiful than it used to be. In fact, there are articles citing the lack of skills for current manufacturing jobs (which I genuinely don't understand, but apparently the only people left in a factory are CNC programmers -- does anyone know the real source of this skill shortage? Is everything done by robots now?)
- There's less corporate paper to push and entry level positions are increasingly being outsourced or eliminated. This leaves tons of people with college degrees, high student debt and no way to pay it back. Example: I used to work in the IT department of a huge insurance company and my older colleagues told me about a time where they had many thousands of people just processing claims, keeping the books, etc. That's mostly gone now.
- There's even pressure on professions like law and medicine -- apparently outsourcing has killed the market for a lot of legal jobs.
The problem is, anyone who advocates having enough employment for everyone at every level is branded a socialist or Luddite. I can't see it getting better until there really is a "1%" of people who have a good life and we have a repeat of the French Revolution.
Sure, we should fix problems with education. But we should also realize that not everyone benefits from more education and can't handle anything beyond a basic job. A janitor shouldn't make the same as a doctor or engineer, but that janitor should at least have some stability in their life. I grew up in the Rust Belt, and it wasn't uncommon for people to graduate high school, and spend the next 40 years at a steel mill or car plant. Those people weren't rich, but the stability of the work meant they could have a few nice things and be solidly middle class even without an expensive education.
All I'm saying is that producing millions of college graduates for a class of work that doesn't fit them or doesn't exist isn't the fix. The conservative ideal of entrepreneurship for all is also silly -- millions of failed business ventures can't be supported by the economy any more than millions of unemployed employees. I say the Rust Belt model is a good one.
There are two things that really bug me about this story and stories like this:
One of the things I would really like to see before I retire is the ability of IT / systems engineering to grow up a little bit and attain the same level of recognition that professional engineers enjoy. I'm old and curmudgeon-y at 38, but one of the things I've consistently seen throughout my career is examples of stuff like this. When standards are put in place (see ITIL as an example,) they are implemented so poorly or are so rigid that they remove any critical thinking from a process. I know many support people in ITIL shops who have quit out of the sheer frustration of paperwork and being limited to pushing pre-defined buttons at pre-defined times. This kills the pipeline for new engineering talent, and we're increasingly at the mercy of high-paid vendors and vendor consultants. In my opinion, this needs to change.
The problem is, how do we do it? A basic engineering education has math, physics, mechanics, thermodynamics, etc, to fall back on. The fundamentals in these subjects change very rarely. Let's say for the moment that "IT" represents the computer systems engineering field, even though I know the term encompasses tons of technician roles. When you dig down into the fundamentals of IT, you're dealing with the interoperability of computer systems, networks, storage, and so on. The concepts are all the same, but the layers on top keep getting changed every few months as new technology comes out. In many cases, old technology gets trotted out again with new underpinnings attached -- see the rise of virtualization and the parallels to the 70's timeshare concept. Sometimes it's change for the sake of change (and a cut of the App Store pie) -- see Windows 8. The field is definitely not static, but neither is engineering. New methods and materials are tried all the time, and if one works better it displaces the old one.
One thing an engineering curriculum that leads to the possibility of PE licensure has is an ethics component. Sure, some people may consider it a joke, and think following ethical guidelines is for suckers when executives get away with things all the time. But, it's there. IT as it is now doesn't really have something like this. How many sysadmins do you know that behave like a slightly less criminal version of the BOFH? I've seen a lot of this behavior, and there's very little done to combat it. Because I'm an ethical idiot, I point out things like the loopholes this guy probably exploited to get his revenge. I've often walked into situations where I've been accidentally granted way too much authority. I don't know about you, but my first reaction isn't to exploit it -- I've politely explained, "Look, I know I can do xyz with my privileges, but I really shouldn't be able to. Please take this away from me." Why? Because I really like the work I do, and I want to keep doing it. The guy in this article is going to be lucky to have any sort of job, let alone work in the IT field again, even if he's found not guilty.
I know that a lot of the problems with education rest with the fact that we trust vendors and their certifications to fill the gap in fundamental knowledge. I absolutely hate vendor "whitepapers" that promise a "deep dive" on a technical subject and are thinly veiled advertisements for a product. Having only that as an educational resource leads to people who have a very vendor-centric view of the world. My natural reaction when faced with an unfamiliar system is to dig in to the details and figure out what's going on under the hood. Vendors don't want you to do that, and employers are happy because the vendor they chose just happens to certify "professionals" who "know" the product in question.
Computer syste