I agree, and I've read the reports. It's just convenient timing that even made it a credible theory.
You would think they'd invest a little more effort in getting VBA working though. Full compatibility with Windows Office is one of the major things keeping people buying Office for Mac. Apple has their own alternative (iWork) and of course you can run any of the open-source office suites on Mac OS. Both ate better than Office 2008 IMO.
In fairness, they're also going to kill VBA on the Windows side too, in favor of Visual Studio Tools for Office. There's going to be a lot of contractor work available for those crazy enough to go picking through 8-year-old Excel macros with 30,000 lines of spaghetti-code goodness.
Never underestimate the power of VBA in large corporations. SAP? J.D. Edwards? PeopleSoft? They're just great big databases for departments to pull the numbers from. All the real crunching is done with some creaky VBA code running on some dude's desktop.
Here's a good question. Microsoft released Office 2008 for Mac,and surprisingly it doesn't come with VBA. This could be _the_ major problem with interoperability.
Companies live and die on Excel macros that various pseudo-programmers have put together over the years. What was Microsoft thinking? Oh wait, I know...:)
In all seriousness, this is a cool thing. Apple has finally started down the enterprise compatibility road, with all the AD hooks and such in Mac OS. Being a Windows admin though, one of the really nice (and really limiting) things about Windows clients + Windows servers is group policy. I can change every machine's IE settings in 15 minutes as opposed to copying down a new firefox config file. I can control almost every tweakable setting on a Windows machine from one location. What's the cross-platform answer for this?
At this point, the central management piece and availability of apps are the two big questions. The other is having the IT department support another piece of hardware.
I'm an old fogey...I graduated 10 years ago. When I was in school, we didn't have any of this fancy wireless Internet access.
I could defintely see this being a huge distraction for the rest of the class. If someone next to you is playing WoW, even with the sound off, that's gotta be annoying. Same thing with someone texting through the entire class.
The real question is, why aren't students paying attention? I had to pay my way through school working almost full-time, so I guess I see things a little differently. Still, _someone_ is paying that monster tuition bill. Seems like a waste to spend class time on the Internet.
I guess that's one of the reason us 30something fossils will never understand the Web 2.0 generation. Now where's my prune juice??
Re:Anything that forces discipline is good.
on
The Return of Ada
·
· Score: 1
Nothing's wrong with _starting_ your search there. I'm referring to the people who find the first word match on Google, and treat that answer like it's religion. It really takes someone who has practical experience to figure out which advice is good and which will lead you down a bad road.
Just peruse any IT forum site for common tech questions. You will see 10 answers for the same question, some of which are totally ridiculous. However, they're not totally ridiculous to someone who hasn't worked in the field long enough to know better.
Think about how different our profession is from, say, medicine or law. Imagine if your doctor went on Google and searched for a procedure. Wouldn't you hope he knew how to figure out who actually knew what they were talking about?
Anything that forces discipline is good.
on
The Return of Ada
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I don't think I'm the only one who has had to work with really lousy programming and IT coworkers. One of the good things about the past was that programmers had a much harder time hiding their mistakes. In the days of dual-core processors and tons of RAM, even a mediocre programmer can get Java or any of the.NET languages to produce code that works. Of course, readability, maintainability and speed aren't really a factor.
Is going back to Ada and other similar languages a good idea? Maybe. But I think you could get the same result by just demanding better quality work out of existing languages. People have correctly pointed out that the languages aren't really to blame, because you can write garbage in just about any language.
I sound like an old fogey, but I'd much rather see a smaller IT workforce with a very high skill set than a huge sea of mediocre IT folks. This would help combat outsourcing and the other problems affecting our jobs. Almost everyone I've heard complaining the loudest about outsourcing has been either downright lazy or just not very good at what they do.
I'm primarily a systems engineer/administrator. There are many parallels in my branch of IT to the development branch. We've got the guys who can really pick a system apart and get into the guts of a problem to find the right answer. We also have the ones who search Google for an answer, find one that solves half the problem, and wonder why the system breaks a different way after they deploy it.
Not sure how to solve it, but I think it's a problem that we should work on.
This article reminds me of a good question. I got into the IT game a little later in life, and have a lot of experience in systems administration. However, I have very little experience as a programmer. I've always been interested in development, but it's not like the old days where you could just jump in with BASIC and build something really cool.
How does someone with lots of systems experience but little development experience get started? It seems like coding Hello World takes a huge amount of work now in most operating systems. (Yes, I know it's easy to spit out Hello World to the terminal in C++ or Java. But how do I get started building something resembling a full application?
My basic problem is that there's no "Start Here" manual.
Disclaimer -- I'm a systems guy. I think I have a unique perspective though -- I get to deal with lousy software after it's been released.
I came into IT through the back door. I was a science major in college, messed with computers all the time as I was growing up, and realized I could make a better living in IT than I could in science. So yes, I don't have a ton of programming experience. I have picked up a lot of information over the years on how operating systems actually work under the hood though.
If I'm given another internally-developed desktop application that does simple database calls requiring a dual-core processor and a minimum of 512 MB of RAM to run, I'm going to go crazy.
I agree with Stroustrup. There really isn't enough good computer science education these days. Computers have gotten so fast and powerful that there's no need to optimize code anymore. This explains why everyone's programming in Java and.NET. Without super-fast computers, any programmer would shy away from compile-at-runtime software. The solution for making a program run faster these days is to throw a bigger box at it. I deal with this every day, trying to explain to project managers and CIOs why we need more money in the hardware budget again.
And I agree with everyone who correctly points out that this isn't 1981. Sure, we don't have to squeeze an entire video game into a 4K Atari 2600 cartridge anymore. But I've seen stuff written internally that's just total garbage, and all of it could be solved by thinking a little bit before attacking the problem. Most of the stuff I deal with is straight from http://www.thedailywtf.com./ Think of massive switch() statements that check hundreds of possibilities, iterating over each entry in a million-row database query result, etc. Everyone in corporate-land has dealt with apps like these...click the Submit button and wait 3 minutes for a result.:-)
Some of this can't be avoided. Most corporate IT departments don't understand the difference between good and bad applications. But I think that if we get people interested in embedded systems or something, things may fix themselves. I highly recommend not teaching CS students Java as their first language....
IT labor shortage numbers are used in many different ways for different purposes.
Large corporations use the shortage argument to complain to Congress that they should be allowed to import talent. Whether that's a good or bad thing is debatable. My experience is that they do have trouble finding "talent". "Warm bodies" are plentiful though. Getting them to _pay_ for true talent is the next step....
Universities use the numbers to justify outside funding for CS and IT programs.
Individuals use it to bargain for their salary (i.e. I'm talented _and_ hard to find, so pay me more.) They also use it when deciding what to do with their lives. A common argument against going into technical subjects is that it's much easier to find a really stable and high paying job in law or management. Managers almost never lose their jobs, and you can practice law until you're disbarred or get tired of it.
Add to this the fact that the definition of IT work keeps changing. Large corporations don't need as many IT people on staff anymore because of the advances in systems. As an example, only the biggest of mainframe shops would still have a "computer operator" position. In smaller companies, the "IT staff" is responsible for many more aspects of the environment than a lone software developer out of hundreds in a big-company setting. Finally, with offshoring of totally tech-focused jobs, there's more of a push to turn us into project managers. (I'm resisting this one as long as I can -- I have nothing to offer in the way of expertise here and it's not something you can just learn. People are too difficult to control.)
I say we should give the market a few more years to settle out. There are still people hanging on from the dotcom craze. Our company just did a big round of IT hiring to correct for a massive growth spurt. It's true what they say -- the truly good people are employed already. If they're not, you have a very short window in which to reach them. The interesting cases come when you see people who have been out of work for months. Some are truly great and have just had a run of bad luck. Others just don't belong in the field and haven't given up yet.
A lot of people resist this idea, but I think a lot of the shortage/surplus findings would be fixed by making IT a profession. Set a barrier to entry, have a formal training program so you can advance predictably, and form a governing body to promote quality and lobby for our interests. This would prevent a lot of those fly-by-night certification schools from giving people false levels of confidence in their abilities. Most IT workers think this is a "union" mentality and therefore evil. But consider this...the AMA lobbies for the interest of its member doctors. Look at malpractice insurance. Same goes for the bar asssociation.
It sounds like most of these Chinese counterfeiting cases have been manufacturers making exact copies of the items they were contracted to make, then selling them without the warranty, name, etc. for similar profit margins.
How much of this is the manufacturer just building more than what they were supposed to, and how much of it is actually theft of intellectual property? I remember reading that the Soviet Union would go the IP theft route...obtain a computer from another country and totally reverse-engineer it so they could use a similar design. My bet is that these manufacturers just want to make more money and not necessarily use the same quality parts. (If you're building 1000 routers, the difference between a $10 transciever and a $100 one is big, for example. How worried should we be that, say, the manufacturer has reverse-engineered IOS and put it into their own gear?
Either way, if my business was based on building clever hardware, I'd be worried about outsourcing the manufacturing to anyone, let alone a different country. However, there is absolutely no way to stop people from demanding cheaper goods. It's at the point where people are haggling over a few cents -- we're just addicted to low prices.
I'm generally not one of these protectionist, "keep America working" types, but I can't see a good way out of this situation. All the scenarios are bad: - Go to war with China or cut off trade completely in some other fashion --> Huge price increases and emergency ramp-up of domestic production --> possibly a bad recession. - Continue as-is --> More poisoned or cloned merchandise and IP theft --> eventually a very bad situation for us. - Try to get China to comply with environmental and IP laws --> ???
I think having the freedom to work at home, at least for part of the time, is a huge benefit. Having this option is one of the reasons I haven't gone for a higher-paying job -- it's a perk I'm willing to "pay for."
Cutting out the miserable commutes that many of us have to endure is a major quality-of-life booster. Every day I don't spend that 3 hours in traffic or on the train is more enjoyable. Plus, we reduce our foreign oil dependence. For jobs like mine, it's actually a huge help not having to be around the office distracted by coworkers gossiping or asking questions.
There will always be jokers who ruin it for everyone, but definitely do it when you're given the ability.
Here's one question -- when and if telecommuting becomes the norm, what are we going to do about the major "class disparity" that will be present between office workers and service workers? If you have to physically go to your job, and your neighbor doesn't, aren't you going to be really unhappy about that? How is work going to change?
No VBA support in the next version of Office for Windows? It's great in terms of eliminating a huge security risk. It's terrible in terms of backward compatibility.
Maybe Microsoft doesn't get this. Companies use SAP, Oracle Financials, SAS, etc. to store and crunch aggregate data. I have never worked in a company that doesn't literally run on hacked-together Access "applications" and Excel macros. Business users pull all that data out of SAP et al and work on it using tools they develop. In many cases, that's because the IT department is too swamped to help them build a proper app, or because it's too much bureaucratic red tape to build an application.
Admittedly, they are replacing it with VSTA. However, any tool that is less forgiving on business-level users' programming mistakes isn't going to be adopted quietly. There's also the cross-platform problem with Mac Office, and the fact that tons of Excel macros and other stuff will need to be rewritten.
If I were Microsoft, I'd build in a highly crippled "compatibility sandbox" that throws up tons of warnings, but runs _most_ non-dangerous VBA code. They did this with Microsoft Graph and other Excel add-ons to encourage people to move on while preserving backward compatibility.
The reversal of the SP3 file format disabling was an easy fix...this one won't be so easy to unwind.
I've seen this kind of logic applied to people who are arrested for DWI offenses. Some local governments have passed laws allowing for the seizure of the person's car, even if they're not convicted yet. I'm guessing it's an overzealous DA assuming that if the person is picked up in the first place, the only way they couldn't be convicted is if the defense was able to prove a procedural error or use some other loophole.
Personally, I think that's the stupidest logic out there. People agree with me too...many of these rules have been shot down as unconstitutional. My opinion of this set of laws is that DWI is a victimless crime until you hurt or kill someone. When that happens, sure, convict them for the connected crime(s) they committed. After that, feed 'em to the ambulance chasers. The poor schmoe will be sending all his license-plate-making money to the victim's family until he dies.
However, I notice that the same kind of crazy public reaction that DWI creates is also being created by content owners in this case. I don't want to sound like I'm defending it, but here's the problem. People who advocate stealing copyrighted material use every justification in the book: - Music sucks anyway. - Movies suck anyway. - Content costs too much for the value. - Artists are rich beyond anyone's wildest dreams. - The industry really isn't losing money. - The industry refuses to adapt their business model. - Etc. Etc.
I'm not an advocate of copyright violation, and I would suspect that if you made your living creating content, you wouldn't be either. Imagine how some of those shareware authors feel when they see cracked copies of the stuff they worked to build on everyone's computer just because someone didn't want to throw them a $49 registration fee. And when it comes to movies/music, there's lots of broke actors for every over-the-top-rich Brad Pitt.z`
I'm sure this law will be overturned, but I see why it has come to this.
This really makes sense, and explains a lot of the attitudes I see on a daily basis in my IT job.
Telling someone they're smarter than everyone else is just going to make them think they're above hard work. They're going to have an inflated ego, and get what I call the typical "IT mindset." How many of you know the stereotypical computer geek who talks down to everybody? How about the coder or sysadmin who doesn't bother to document their work because "no one else could possibly understand it?" Face it, most of us did pretty well in grade school and high school, and I'm sure a lot of our parents thought we were special. I'm a little bit different. My parents always told me I was smart, but I knew for myself that most of my success was due to working my butt off. While other people were getting A's without even studying, I went nuts just trying to keep up. By the time college rolled around, I realized I just wasn't as good at "being a student" as other people were.
Concentrating on hard work rather than trying to nurture an innate genius that just isn't there will always yield better results. And despite massive evidence to the contrary, working hard almost always pays in the long run. In my chosen field, that translates to constantly keeping my skills sharp and proving to my employer that I'm worth the salary they pay me. Some people in IT do this by hoarding information about what they work on (never a long-term answer) or building up a "rockstar" facade. You may get ahead in the short term by doing this, but it'll all come back to haunt you the next time the CxO's find a lower cost outsourcing destination.
I know I'm going to get it for this, but here goes. One of the biggest holdbacks on technology progress is the constant churning of the tech landscape every few months. Before you think I'm crazy, hear me out. How many people work in workplaces that use Technology X where the CIO reads an airline magazine article about Technology Y? The next day, you're ripping out system X, which was actually getting stable and mature, and implementing Y just because it's new. When Y starts causing all sorts of problems, Technology Z will come along and solve everything. Software and hardware vendors love this because it keeps them in business. Most mature IT people can't stand it because they're constantly reinventing the wheel.
There's a reason why core systems at large businesses are never changed...they work, and have had years to stabilize. Along the way, new features are added on top.
I know the thrust of the article was "what's holding up progress in general?" Part of running a good IT organization is balancing the new and shiny with the mature and tested. Bringing in new stuff alongside the mature stuff is definitely the way to go. See what works for you, and keep stuff that works and isn't a huge pain to support.
One other note -- a lot of technology innovation isn't really innovation. It's just repackaging old ideas. SOA and Web 2.0 is the new mainframe/centalized computing environment. Utility computing is just beefed-up timesharing distributed out on a massive scale. This is another thing that holds up progress. Vendors reinvent the same tech over and over to build "new" products.
I remember reading an article about HP doing this very same thing last year. They had a fairly large number of telecommuters, and called them back because they didn't feel they could adequately communicate with them. I don't remember the exact quote, but the press release mentioned that they needed "all hands on deck" for whatever they had planned.
I totally see both sides of this issue. On the anti-telework side, you have two camps. The first is the "old-school" executive types who don't believe anyone can be producing anything unless they're physically in the office. That'll never change until they're retired...that's the way they went to work in 1968, and that's the way we do it now. Period. The other group is convinced that, for whatever reason, a telework force just isn't getting anything done. That's entirely possible. It takes _a lot_ of discipline to get stuff done when you're in a comfortable environment.
On the pro-telework side, you have people like me. I live far from my job. To get to one of my possible work locations, I have a choice. I can take a 1.5 hour, 35 mile car trip in horrible traffic or a 1.25 hour 50 mile train ride (which is actually fine except for the time it takes.) That's three hours of totally wasted time a day. When things aren't totally, nuts, I telecommute 1 or 2 days a week. It keeps me sane and productive. Granted, there are some really lazy people out there who just wouldn't be able to handle it. However, for those who have proven they can handle it, it seems to me like it'd be a great privilege to offer. The caveat would then be that if your performance slips, you're back in the office.
IMO, telework is ruined by the percentage of people who use it as an excuse to play World of Warcraft in their PJs instead of doing work. (And I'm waiting for a VM to finish building itself now, so I'm actually working.:-) )
If people could get their act together, telework would really cut down on the cars on the road, reduce fuel usage, and probably take the "pissed-off" edge out of people who have to deal with a long drive to/from work. Going into the physical office for part of the week would also let parents spend more time with their kids at home (balancing it with their work, of course.)
I do the PC architecture work for a large company that's soon to have a majority of laptop systems. While it's true they make life harder from a support perspective, they're also the new normal. People expect to cart their machines around with them to meetings, on the road, etc. The Web 2.0 crowd coming in is also going to demand mobility even more than the current crop of workers. If they don't demand that you connect their iPhones to the network, they'll definitely scream for portable machines.
All you have to do is adjust your expectations. You have to assume that you won't be able to quickly roll out a configuration change, and need to have tools in place that can effectively manage the machines when they do connect in. We have it even worse, since our users are on the corporate LAN for minutes, not hours, at a time. We've had to develop our own workarounds for these kind of management problems.
The other thing you need to assume is that these things are going to get stolen. Disk encryption is a huge project that's on my radar. ideally, I'd love to give people a thin client laptop that had no data on it, but that's just not possible now. Maybe if SaaS ever takes off, but not now.:)
I've been reading some of the comments regarding this article, and for those who say older IT workers can't compete with younger ones, just wait till you're in your 30s and 40s. Your outlook will probably change at that point.
The startup culture at Google works very well with young IT talent. In the beginning of a business venture, you have to have that "force it through, just get it done!" attitude towards your IT projects. Once you're established, however, that craziness has to be turned down a notch. Otherwise, you have situations like I've seen, with people rolling untested code into production systems, no testing at all, etc.
Older IT workers tend to build systems that don't randomly blow up in the middle of the night. This is because they know the business units they support don't want to hear about new, cool stuff when the systems are down 2 hours before close on the last day of the quarter. The older types also tend to have lives outside of work. (This isn't an unfair stereotype -- a lot changes once you get married and have a family. They expect you to be around once in a while...)
Innovation and new thinking definitely has its place, but it should be totally separate from day-to-day operations. Personally, I want to be building new stuff until I retire. This involves a lot of personal investment in my career, learning new things as they come up, and using my experience with things that worked/didn't work in the past. Not all of us old-timers coast along in management when we get sick of learning.
Technology work really has changed over the last 30 years. Back in the beginning, it was totally exciting just to get something working. Now it's still fun, but a lot of the tough problems are solved or abstracted away from the end user.
I wonder what it's like for total newcomers now -- there's no easy way to throw someone into modern software development like you could by handing them a BASIC manual or an assembly language guide on the IIe. There just isn't as much "brand new stuff" to explore.
I still like working in the technology field because it is very challenging, and solving problems for a living is a lot more fun than filling out TPS reports.
(If Woz wants a tech job, any geek in their 30s would be more than happy to let him come work, I'm sure.:)
Very little compares to the durability of the ThinkPads, at least in the non-rugged category. You pay dearly for them, but they last forever compared to other notebooks.
Even Dell's Lattitude business line still feels like a toy. Dell really improved their notebooks over the last iteration, and they're still crap. HP's business line (not the consumer junk with the blinky blue lights and 17" monitors) is the only one IMO that comes close to IBM/Lenovo's case design and construction.
If you really want rugged or semi-rugged, you probably need to look at the Panasonic Toughbooks. They're solid, but they're 20% heavier than they should be and you compromise on case design for durability. (Side note, if you buy the true rugged Toughbook, it's assembled in the US (probably for military contract requirements.) You pay accordingly too...list on some of the rugged models is in the $2000-$3000 range.
Your other choice might be a MacBook Pro, but those aluminum cases don't look like they can take a beating the way the old ThinkPads can.
(By the way, everything's made in China now. If it wasn't, you wouldn't be paying the cheap prices you get for hardware now.)
Service Pack 1 is due pretty soon for Vista, which is going to get more companies looking at it. However, there's a bigger problem. Although it's nicer looking, it doesn't have a whole lot to offer "enterprise" level customers.
There's some stuff I really like about Vista. I like the ability to allow old apps to virtualize access to the one or two directories or reg keys they need to access. The old "manual hunt with RegMon" fix method, as any desktop support person knows, is the most annoying thing about running an XP system as a non-admin. I also like the better device support.
The downsides are there too though...the UI is a huge performance penalty, even with Aero shut off. Most businesses are not going to want to go out and buy RAM for current desktops or junk the older desktops just because they want to roll out Vista. Plus, a lot of early adopters got burned with some of the file transfer speed and network bugs.
Truth is, Vista is not a slam-dunk upgrade. 2000 vs. NT was. Even XP vs. 2000 was, depending on who you ask. The problem this time around is that there's a new user interface, and a huge hardware hurdle to jump. I think Microsoft is going to have a ton of XP holdouts on their hands in the next few years, much longer than they expected. (The place I used to work was an NT holdout until last year.)
This is by no means a "keep the legacy crap" rant -- systems you can't buy parts for without an unlimited budget should be retired ASAP.
However, I wonder who's handling the conversion for them, or if the Air Force is doing it themselves. I've seen great legacy conversion projects, and been involved in some really awful ones. One problem is just a lack of people who know enough about the "old" system to implement the software in the "new" side. The other, and far worse one is when companies (not militaries, mind you) bring in contractors who know _nothing_ about the hidden surprises in the old system, or nothing about the actual real-world application the computer is supporting.
As long as the system's not running J2EE or outsourced to a bunch of "expert" consultants, I'm guessing we're fine. But there is one key thing that's lost on "modern" IT -- proven systems work. Just because something is new doesn't mean it will work better! This is why I'm glad they stuck with UNIX instead of Linux or Windows.
Side note, how much do you think IBM was charging to maintain that monster??
Here's something to think about; feel free to tell me if you think I'm wrong.
This is probably the first or second graduating class who spent their entire college career exposed to the social networking phenomenon. I think this is going to further drive apart the generational gaps that exist in workplaces.
I'm actually in the middle; I went to college just as the web was becoming popular. It was a really neat toy...sites like Yahoo and online retailers were just getting started. We used it just like that...a useful way to get stuff done, and maybe sent emails to people we knew.
The whole "Web 2.0" jump is a big adjustment for us 30-year-old fogies. Now the web is someplace you live your life. I've never had any desire to put up a blog about my pets, for example, because I know no one cares. I've also never seen the need to put up a Myspace page. This takes up a significant portion of social networkers' lifetimes. They work incredibly hard on their online presence, as if it were a vital component of their survival.
Anyway, back to the workplace. The "truly old school" is on the way out, but people like me are coming up to take their places at the top 10 years or so from now. Having an entire generation of new employees who have zero attention span, can't write in complete sentences and find regular work boring is probably going to cause friction. (I'm going to sound _really_ old here...how many times have you seen emails going out to customers at your job with sentences like "can u gt me the po#s b4 friday? thx") That drives me nuts -- please take two seconds and proofread e-mail! The other thing I might see happening is the "inflated self-worth" phenomenon. Someone needs to bring some of these people back to reality and make them realize that none of us is special.
I'm off to have my prune juice and medication now...
Just like HIPAA or Sarbanes-Oxley...
on
PCI Compliance
·
· Score: 1, Troll
...PCI is an excuse to hire the KPMGs, Accentures and EDSs of the world. They will charge you $xM for "experts" to put in controls and make your systems secure. All the while, only a few percent of your card transactions are fraudulent. The thing about PCI is that you can't just take the hit for fraud anymore...you get smacked with huge fines for every leaked credit card number, etc.
I'm not a big believer in the whole "identity theft" hype -- if someone steals your credit card numbers or social security number, just get copies of your credit reports, make the appropriate phone calls, and the problem goes away.
From what I've seen, PCI's just a consultant-employment excuse. Anyone can still write down credit card numbers and sell them. Maybe forcing the card industry into adopting a secure payment system in the first place would be a better way to go. Overall though, having no standards is bad too, so that's definitely what PCI is good for.
Every company is now trying to jump on the Web 2.0 bandwagon. It's the equivalent of a guy trying to be cool in a hip. trendy nightclub wearing a pair of plaid golf pants.
It really surprises me that marketing departments don't take one look at the concept of a corporate Facebook page, MySpace page, or Second Life presence and fire the idiot who produced it.
Imagine trying to sell life insurance to a bunch of skater dudes drinking Mountain Dew...that's the success rate this will have.
OK, on one hand, monopolies almost always abuse their power. Some actually run OK and are good for a society (public utilities like electric and gas are good examples.) I'm actually a proponent of the old-style Bell system for local phone access -- you deal with a single company who sets all the standards and keeps the network running well. The trade-off, of course, is innovation. Or so people claim.
The other side of the coin is also prevalent in telecom and other industries -- companies with a psycho executive board that has no concept of the time beyond next quarter. Too often, we hear stories of executives laying off a percentage of the workforce just to make the numbers that year. Or outsourcing things like IT or customer service because some MBA told them that these aren't "core competencies.' Try getting broadband service out of the telecom companies if you live out in the middle of nowhere, for example...it's not easy. No profit-oriented company wants to support it. This was part of the reason the phone monopoly existed, and why you still pay universal service fees on common-carrier service.
So, monopoly = bad. Unchecked competition = bad. Now what?? I would argue that #2 is better in a perfect world as long as we can reduce the focus on short-term gains. However, now that absolutely everyone is counting on the stock market/casino for their retirement, I can't see that happening. Because of that, #1 is still sometimes the best choice in our imperfect, corrupt world.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, and I've read the reports. It's just convenient timing that even made it a credible theory.
You would think they'd invest a little more effort in getting VBA working though. Full compatibility with Windows Office is one of the major things keeping people buying Office for Mac. Apple has their own alternative (iWork) and of course you can run any of the open-source office suites on Mac OS. Both ate better than Office 2008 IMO.
In fairness, they're also going to kill VBA on the Windows side too, in favor of Visual Studio Tools for Office. There's going to be a lot of contractor work available for those crazy enough to go picking through 8-year-old Excel macros with 30,000 lines of spaghetti-code goodness.
Never underestimate the power of VBA in large corporations. SAP? J.D. Edwards? PeopleSoft? They're just great big databases for departments to pull the numbers from. All the real crunching is done with some creaky VBA code running on some dude's desktop.
Here's a good question. Microsoft released Office 2008 for Mac,and surprisingly it doesn't come with VBA. This could be _the_ major problem with interoperability.
:)
Companies live and die on Excel macros that various pseudo-programmers have put together over the years. What was Microsoft thinking? Oh wait, I know...
In all seriousness, this is a cool thing. Apple has finally started down the enterprise compatibility road, with all the AD hooks and such in Mac OS. Being a Windows admin though, one of the really nice (and really limiting) things about Windows clients + Windows servers is group policy. I can change every machine's IE settings in 15 minutes as opposed to copying down a new firefox config file. I can control almost every tweakable setting on a Windows machine from one location. What's the cross-platform answer for this?
At this point, the central management piece and availability of apps are the two big questions. The other is having the IT department support another piece of hardware.
I'm an old fogey...I graduated 10 years ago. When I was in school, we didn't have any of this fancy wireless Internet access.
I could defintely see this being a huge distraction for the rest of the class. If someone next to you is playing WoW, even with the sound off, that's gotta be annoying. Same thing with someone texting through the entire class.
The real question is, why aren't students paying attention? I had to pay my way through school working almost full-time, so I guess I see things a little differently. Still, _someone_ is paying that monster tuition bill. Seems like a waste to spend class time on the Internet.
I guess that's one of the reason us 30something fossils will never understand the Web 2.0 generation. Now where's my prune juice??
Nothing's wrong with _starting_ your search there. I'm referring to the people who find the first word match on Google, and treat that answer like it's religion. It really takes someone who has practical experience to figure out which advice is good and which will lead you down a bad road.
Just peruse any IT forum site for common tech questions. You will see 10 answers for the same question, some of which are totally ridiculous. However, they're not totally ridiculous to someone who hasn't worked in the field long enough to know better.
Think about how different our profession is from, say, medicine or law. Imagine if your doctor went on Google and searched for a procedure. Wouldn't you hope he knew how to figure out who actually knew what they were talking about?
I don't think I'm the only one who has had to work with really lousy programming and IT coworkers. One of the good things about the past was that programmers had a much harder time hiding their mistakes. In the days of dual-core processors and tons of RAM, even a mediocre programmer can get Java or any of the .NET languages to produce code that works. Of course, readability, maintainability and speed aren't really a factor.
Is going back to Ada and other similar languages a good idea? Maybe. But I think you could get the same result by just demanding better quality work out of existing languages. People have correctly pointed out that the languages aren't really to blame, because you can write garbage in just about any language.
I sound like an old fogey, but I'd much rather see a smaller IT workforce with a very high skill set than a huge sea of mediocre IT folks. This would help combat outsourcing and the other problems affecting our jobs. Almost everyone I've heard complaining the loudest about outsourcing has been either downright lazy or just not very good at what they do.
I'm primarily a systems engineer/administrator. There are many parallels in my branch of IT to the development branch. We've got the guys who can really pick a system apart and get into the guts of a problem to find the right answer. We also have the ones who search Google for an answer, find one that solves half the problem, and wonder why the system breaks a different way after they deploy it.
Not sure how to solve it, but I think it's a problem that we should work on.
This article reminds me of a good question. I got into the IT game a little later in life, and have a lot of experience in systems administration. However, I have very little experience as a programmer. I've always been interested in development, but it's not like the old days where you could just jump in with BASIC and build something really cool.
How does someone with lots of systems experience but little development experience get started? It seems like coding Hello World takes a huge amount of work now in most operating systems. (Yes, I know it's easy to spit out Hello World to the terminal in C++ or Java. But how do I get started building something resembling a full application?
My basic problem is that there's no "Start Here" manual.
Disclaimer -- I'm a systems guy. I think I have a unique perspective though -- I get to deal with lousy software after it's been released.
.NET. Without super-fast computers, any programmer would shy away from compile-at-runtime software. The solution for making a program run faster these days is to throw a bigger box at it. I deal with this every day, trying to explain to project managers and CIOs why we need more money in the hardware budget again.
:-)
I came into IT through the back door. I was a science major in college, messed with computers all the time as I was growing up, and realized I could make a better living in IT than I could in science. So yes, I don't have a ton of programming experience. I have picked up a lot of information over the years on how operating systems actually work under the hood though.
If I'm given another internally-developed desktop application that does simple database calls requiring a dual-core processor and a minimum of 512 MB of RAM to run, I'm going to go crazy.
I agree with Stroustrup. There really isn't enough good computer science education these days. Computers have gotten so fast and powerful that there's no need to optimize code anymore. This explains why everyone's programming in Java and
And I agree with everyone who correctly points out that this isn't 1981. Sure, we don't have to squeeze an entire video game into a 4K Atari 2600 cartridge anymore. But I've seen stuff written internally that's just total garbage, and all of it could be solved by thinking a little bit before attacking the problem. Most of the stuff I deal with is straight from http://www.thedailywtf.com./ Think of massive switch() statements that check hundreds of possibilities, iterating over each entry in a million-row database query result, etc. Everyone in corporate-land has dealt with apps like these...click the Submit button and wait 3 minutes for a result.
Some of this can't be avoided. Most corporate IT departments don't understand the difference between good and bad applications. But I think that if we get people interested in embedded systems or something, things may fix themselves. I highly recommend not teaching CS students Java as their first language....
Add to this the fact that the definition of IT work keeps changing. Large corporations don't need as many IT people on staff anymore because of the advances in systems. As an example, only the biggest of mainframe shops would still have a "computer operator" position. In smaller companies, the "IT staff" is responsible for many more aspects of the environment than a lone software developer out of hundreds in a big-company setting. Finally, with offshoring of totally tech-focused jobs, there's more of a push to turn us into project managers. (I'm resisting this one as long as I can -- I have nothing to offer in the way of expertise here and it's not something you can just learn. People are too difficult to control.)
I say we should give the market a few more years to settle out. There are still people hanging on from the dotcom craze. Our company just did a big round of IT hiring to correct for a massive growth spurt. It's true what they say -- the truly good people are employed already. If they're not, you have a very short window in which to reach them. The interesting cases come when you see people who have been out of work for months. Some are truly great and have just had a run of bad luck. Others just don't belong in the field and haven't given up yet.
A lot of people resist this idea, but I think a lot of the shortage/surplus findings would be fixed by making IT a profession. Set a barrier to entry, have a formal training program so you can advance predictably, and form a governing body to promote quality and lobby for our interests. This would prevent a lot of those fly-by-night certification schools from giving people false levels of confidence in their abilities. Most IT workers think this is a "union" mentality and therefore evil. But consider this...the AMA lobbies for the interest of its member doctors. Look at malpractice insurance. Same goes for the bar asssociation.
It sounds like most of these Chinese counterfeiting cases have been manufacturers making exact copies of the items they were contracted to make, then selling them without the warranty, name, etc. for similar profit margins.
How much of this is the manufacturer just building more than what they were supposed to, and how much of it is actually theft of intellectual property? I remember reading that the Soviet Union would go the IP theft route...obtain a computer from another country and totally reverse-engineer it so they could use a similar design. My bet is that these manufacturers just want to make more money and not necessarily use the same quality parts. (If you're building 1000 routers, the difference between a $10 transciever and a $100 one is big, for example. How worried should we be that, say, the manufacturer has reverse-engineered IOS and put it into their own gear?
Either way, if my business was based on building clever hardware, I'd be worried about outsourcing the manufacturing to anyone, let alone a different country. However, there is absolutely no way to stop people from demanding cheaper goods. It's at the point where people are haggling over a few cents -- we're just addicted to low prices.
I'm generally not one of these protectionist, "keep America working" types, but I can't see a good way out of this situation. All the scenarios are bad:
- Go to war with China or cut off trade completely in some other fashion --> Huge price increases and emergency ramp-up of domestic production --> possibly a bad recession.
- Continue as-is --> More poisoned or cloned merchandise and IP theft --> eventually a very bad situation for us.
- Try to get China to comply with environmental and IP laws --> ???
I think having the freedom to work at home, at least for part of the time, is a huge benefit. Having this option is one of the reasons I haven't gone for a higher-paying job -- it's a perk I'm willing to "pay for."
Cutting out the miserable commutes that many of us have to endure is a major quality-of-life booster. Every day I don't spend that 3 hours in traffic or on the train is more enjoyable. Plus, we reduce our foreign oil dependence. For jobs like mine, it's actually a huge help not having to be around the office distracted by coworkers gossiping or asking questions.
There will always be jokers who ruin it for everyone, but definitely do it when you're given the ability.
Here's one question -- when and if telecommuting becomes the norm, what are we going to do about the major "class disparity" that will be present between office workers and service workers? If you have to physically go to your job, and your neighbor doesn't, aren't you going to be really unhappy about that? How is work going to change?
No VBA support in the next version of Office for Windows? It's great in terms of eliminating a huge security risk. It's terrible in terms of backward compatibility.
Maybe Microsoft doesn't get this. Companies use SAP, Oracle Financials, SAS, etc. to store and crunch aggregate data. I have never worked in a company that doesn't literally run on hacked-together Access "applications" and Excel macros. Business users pull all that data out of SAP et al and work on it using tools they develop. In many cases, that's because the IT department is too swamped to help them build a proper app, or because it's too much bureaucratic red tape to build an application.
Admittedly, they are replacing it with VSTA. However, any tool that is less forgiving on business-level users' programming mistakes isn't going to be adopted quietly. There's also the cross-platform problem with Mac Office, and the fact that tons of Excel macros and other stuff will need to be rewritten.
If I were Microsoft, I'd build in a highly crippled "compatibility sandbox" that throws up tons of warnings, but runs _most_ non-dangerous VBA code. They did this with Microsoft Graph and other Excel add-ons to encourage people to move on while preserving backward compatibility.
The reversal of the SP3 file format disabling was an easy fix...this one won't be so easy to unwind.
I've seen this kind of logic applied to people who are arrested for DWI offenses. Some local governments have passed laws allowing for the seizure of the person's car, even if they're not convicted yet. I'm guessing it's an overzealous DA assuming that if the person is picked up in the first place, the only way they couldn't be convicted is if the defense was able to prove a procedural error or use some other loophole.
Personally, I think that's the stupidest logic out there. People agree with me too...many of these rules have been shot down as unconstitutional. My opinion of this set of laws is that DWI is a victimless crime until you hurt or kill someone. When that happens, sure, convict them for the connected crime(s) they committed. After that, feed 'em to the ambulance chasers. The poor schmoe will be sending all his license-plate-making money to the victim's family until he dies.
However, I notice that the same kind of crazy public reaction that DWI creates is also being created by content owners in this case. I don't want to sound like I'm defending it, but here's the problem. People who advocate stealing copyrighted material use every justification in the book:
- Music sucks anyway.
- Movies suck anyway.
- Content costs too much for the value.
- Artists are rich beyond anyone's wildest dreams.
- The industry really isn't losing money.
- The industry refuses to adapt their business model.
- Etc. Etc.
I'm not an advocate of copyright violation, and I would suspect that if you made your living creating content, you wouldn't be either. Imagine how some of those shareware authors feel when they see cracked copies of the stuff they worked to build on everyone's computer just because someone didn't want to throw them a $49 registration fee. And when it comes to movies/music, there's lots of broke actors for every over-the-top-rich Brad Pitt.z`
I'm sure this law will be overturned, but I see why it has come to this.
This really makes sense, and explains a lot of the attitudes I see on a daily basis in my IT job.
Telling someone they're smarter than everyone else is just going to make them think they're above hard work. They're going to have an inflated ego, and get what I call the typical "IT mindset." How many of you know the stereotypical computer geek who talks down to everybody? How about the coder or sysadmin who doesn't bother to document their work because "no one else could possibly understand it?" Face it, most of us did pretty well in grade school and high school, and I'm sure a lot of our parents thought we were special. I'm a little bit different. My parents always told me I was smart, but I knew for myself that most of my success was due to working my butt off. While other people were getting A's without even studying, I went nuts just trying to keep up. By the time college rolled around, I realized I just wasn't as good at "being a student" as other people were.
Concentrating on hard work rather than trying to nurture an innate genius that just isn't there will always yield better results. And despite massive evidence to the contrary, working hard almost always pays in the long run. In my chosen field, that translates to constantly keeping my skills sharp and proving to my employer that I'm worth the salary they pay me. Some people in IT do this by hoarding information about what they work on (never a long-term answer) or building up a "rockstar" facade. You may get ahead in the short term by doing this, but it'll all come back to haunt you the next time the CxO's find a lower cost outsourcing destination.
I know I'm going to get it for this, but here goes. One of the biggest holdbacks on technology progress is the constant churning of the tech landscape every few months. Before you think I'm crazy, hear me out. How many people work in workplaces that use Technology X where the CIO reads an airline magazine article about Technology Y? The next day, you're ripping out system X, which was actually getting stable and mature, and implementing Y just because it's new. When Y starts causing all sorts of problems, Technology Z will come along and solve everything. Software and hardware vendors love this because it keeps them in business. Most mature IT people can't stand it because they're constantly reinventing the wheel.
There's a reason why core systems at large businesses are never changed...they work, and have had years to stabilize. Along the way, new features are added on top.
I know the thrust of the article was "what's holding up progress in general?" Part of running a good IT organization is balancing the new and shiny with the mature and tested. Bringing in new stuff alongside the mature stuff is definitely the way to go. See what works for you, and keep stuff that works and isn't a huge pain to support.
One other note -- a lot of technology innovation isn't really innovation. It's just repackaging old ideas. SOA and Web 2.0 is the new mainframe/centalized computing environment. Utility computing is just beefed-up timesharing distributed out on a massive scale. This is another thing that holds up progress. Vendors reinvent the same tech over and over to build "new" products.
I remember reading an article about HP doing this very same thing last year. They had a fairly large number of telecommuters, and called them back because they didn't feel they could adequately communicate with them. I don't remember the exact quote, but the press release mentioned that they needed "all hands on deck" for whatever they had planned.
:-) )
I totally see both sides of this issue. On the anti-telework side, you have two camps. The first is the "old-school" executive types who don't believe anyone can be producing anything unless they're physically in the office. That'll never change until they're retired...that's the way they went to work in 1968, and that's the way we do it now. Period. The other group is convinced that, for whatever reason, a telework force just isn't getting anything done. That's entirely possible. It takes _a lot_ of discipline to get stuff done when you're in a comfortable environment.
On the pro-telework side, you have people like me. I live far from my job. To get to one of my possible work locations, I have a choice. I can take a 1.5 hour, 35 mile car trip in horrible traffic or a 1.25 hour 50 mile train ride (which is actually fine except for the time it takes.) That's three hours of totally wasted time a day. When things aren't totally, nuts, I telecommute 1 or 2 days a week. It keeps me sane and productive. Granted, there are some really lazy people out there who just wouldn't be able to handle it. However, for those who have proven they can handle it, it seems to me like it'd be a great privilege to offer. The caveat would then be that if your performance slips, you're back in the office.
IMO, telework is ruined by the percentage of people who use it as an excuse to play World of Warcraft in their PJs instead of doing work. (And I'm waiting for a VM to finish building itself now, so I'm actually working.
If people could get their act together, telework would really cut down on the cars on the road, reduce fuel usage, and probably take the "pissed-off" edge out of people who have to deal with a long drive to/from work. Going into the physical office for part of the week would also let parents spend more time with their kids at home (balancing it with their work, of course.)
I do the PC architecture work for a large company that's soon to have a majority of laptop systems. While it's true they make life harder from a support perspective, they're also the new normal. People expect to cart their machines around with them to meetings, on the road, etc. The Web 2.0 crowd coming in is also going to demand mobility even more than the current crop of workers. If they don't demand that you connect their iPhones to the network, they'll definitely scream for portable machines.
:)
All you have to do is adjust your expectations. You have to assume that you won't be able to quickly roll out a configuration change, and need to have tools in place that can effectively manage the machines when they do connect in. We have it even worse, since our users are on the corporate LAN for minutes, not hours, at a time. We've had to develop our own workarounds for these kind of management problems.
The other thing you need to assume is that these things are going to get stolen. Disk encryption is a huge project that's on my radar. ideally, I'd love to give people a thin client laptop that had no data on it, but that's just not possible now. Maybe if SaaS ever takes off, but not now.
I've been reading some of the comments regarding this article, and for those who say older IT workers can't compete with younger ones, just wait till you're in your 30s and 40s. Your outlook will probably change at that point.
The startup culture at Google works very well with young IT talent. In the beginning of a business venture, you have to have that "force it through, just get it done!" attitude towards your IT projects. Once you're established, however, that craziness has to be turned down a notch. Otherwise, you have situations like I've seen, with people rolling untested code into production systems, no testing at all, etc.
Older IT workers tend to build systems that don't randomly blow up in the middle of the night. This is because they know the business units they support don't want to hear about new, cool stuff when the systems are down 2 hours before close on the last day of the quarter. The older types also tend to have lives outside of work. (This isn't an unfair stereotype -- a lot changes once you get married and have a family. They expect you to be around once in a while...)
Innovation and new thinking definitely has its place, but it should be totally separate from day-to-day operations. Personally, I want to be building new stuff until I retire. This involves a lot of personal investment in my career, learning new things as they come up, and using my experience with things that worked/didn't work in the past. Not all of us old-timers coast along in management when we get sick of learning.
Technology work really has changed over the last 30 years. Back in the beginning, it was totally exciting just to get something working. Now it's still fun, but a lot of the tough problems are solved or abstracted away from the end user.
:)
I wonder what it's like for total newcomers now -- there's no easy way to throw someone into modern software development like you could by handing them a BASIC manual or an assembly language guide on the IIe. There just isn't as much "brand new stuff" to explore.
I still like working in the technology field because it is very challenging, and solving problems for a living is a lot more fun than filling out TPS reports.
(If Woz wants a tech job, any geek in their 30s would be more than happy to let him come work, I'm sure.
Very little compares to the durability of the ThinkPads, at least in the non-rugged category. You pay dearly for them, but they last forever compared to other notebooks.
Even Dell's Lattitude business line still feels like a toy. Dell really improved their notebooks over the last iteration, and they're still crap. HP's business line (not the consumer junk with the blinky blue lights and 17" monitors) is the only one IMO that comes close to IBM/Lenovo's case design and construction.
If you really want rugged or semi-rugged, you probably need to look at the Panasonic Toughbooks. They're solid, but they're 20% heavier than they should be and you compromise on case design for durability. (Side note, if you buy the true rugged Toughbook, it's assembled in the US (probably for military contract requirements.) You pay accordingly too...list on some of the rugged models is in the $2000-$3000 range.
Your other choice might be a MacBook Pro, but those aluminum cases don't look like they can take a beating the way the old ThinkPads can.
(By the way, everything's made in China now. If it wasn't, you wouldn't be paying the cheap prices you get for hardware now.)
Service Pack 1 is due pretty soon for Vista, which is going to get more companies looking at it. However, there's a bigger problem. Although it's nicer looking, it doesn't have a whole lot to offer "enterprise" level customers.
There's some stuff I really like about Vista. I like the ability to allow old apps to virtualize access to the one or two directories or reg keys they need to access. The old "manual hunt with RegMon" fix method, as any desktop support person knows, is the most annoying thing about running an XP system as a non-admin. I also like the better device support.
The downsides are there too though...the UI is a huge performance penalty, even with Aero shut off. Most businesses are not going to want to go out and buy RAM for current desktops or junk the older desktops just because they want to roll out Vista. Plus, a lot of early adopters got burned with some of the file transfer speed and network bugs.
Truth is, Vista is not a slam-dunk upgrade. 2000 vs. NT was. Even XP vs. 2000 was, depending on who you ask. The problem this time around is that there's a new user interface, and a huge hardware hurdle to jump. I think Microsoft is going to have a ton of XP holdouts on their hands in the next few years, much longer than they expected. (The place I used to work was an NT holdout until last year.)
This is by no means a "keep the legacy crap" rant -- systems you can't buy parts for without an unlimited budget should be retired ASAP.
However, I wonder who's handling the conversion for them, or if the Air Force is doing it themselves. I've seen great legacy conversion projects, and been involved in some really awful ones. One problem is just a lack of people who know enough about the "old" system to implement the software in the "new" side. The other, and far worse one is when companies (not militaries, mind you) bring in contractors who know _nothing_ about the hidden surprises in the old system, or nothing about the actual real-world application the computer is supporting.
As long as the system's not running J2EE or outsourced to a bunch of "expert" consultants, I'm guessing we're fine. But there is one key thing that's lost on "modern" IT -- proven systems work. Just because something is new doesn't mean it will work better! This is why I'm glad they stuck with UNIX instead of Linux or Windows.
Side note, how much do you think IBM was charging to maintain that monster??
Here's something to think about; feel free to tell me if you think I'm wrong.
This is probably the first or second graduating class who spent their entire college career exposed to the social networking phenomenon. I think this is going to further drive apart the generational gaps that exist in workplaces.
I'm actually in the middle; I went to college just as the web was becoming popular. It was a really neat toy...sites like Yahoo and online retailers were just getting started. We used it just like that...a useful way to get stuff done, and maybe sent emails to people we knew.
The whole "Web 2.0" jump is a big adjustment for us 30-year-old fogies. Now the web is someplace you live your life. I've never had any desire to put up a blog about my pets, for example, because I know no one cares. I've also never seen the need to put up a Myspace page. This takes up a significant portion of social networkers' lifetimes. They work incredibly hard on their online presence, as if it were a vital component of their survival.
Anyway, back to the workplace. The "truly old school" is on the way out, but people like me are coming up to take their places at the top 10 years or so from now. Having an entire generation of new employees who have zero attention span, can't write in complete sentences and find regular work boring is probably going to cause friction. (I'm going to sound _really_ old here...how many times have you seen emails going out to customers at your job with sentences like "can u gt me the po#s b4 friday? thx") That drives me nuts -- please take two seconds and proofread e-mail! The other thing I might see happening is the "inflated self-worth" phenomenon. Someone needs to bring some of these people back to reality and make them realize that none of us is special.
I'm off to have my prune juice and medication now...
...PCI is an excuse to hire the KPMGs, Accentures and EDSs of the world. They will charge you $xM for "experts" to put in controls and make your systems secure. All the while, only a few percent of your card transactions are fraudulent. The thing about PCI is that you can't just take the hit for fraud anymore...you get smacked with huge fines for every leaked credit card number, etc.
I'm not a big believer in the whole "identity theft" hype -- if someone steals your credit card numbers or social security number, just get copies of your credit reports, make the appropriate phone calls, and the problem goes away.
From what I've seen, PCI's just a consultant-employment excuse. Anyone can still write down credit card numbers and sell them. Maybe forcing the card industry into adopting a secure payment system in the first place would be a better way to go. Overall though, having no standards is bad too, so that's definitely what PCI is good for.
Every company is now trying to jump on the Web 2.0 bandwagon. It's the equivalent of a guy trying to be cool in a hip. trendy nightclub wearing a pair of plaid golf pants.
It really surprises me that marketing departments don't take one look at the concept of a corporate Facebook page, MySpace page, or Second Life presence and fire the idiot who produced it.
Imagine trying to sell life insurance to a bunch of skater dudes drinking Mountain Dew...that's the success rate this will have.
OK, on one hand, monopolies almost always abuse their power. Some actually run OK and are good for a society (public utilities like electric and gas are good examples.) I'm actually a proponent of the old-style Bell system for local phone access -- you deal with a single company who sets all the standards and keeps the network running well. The trade-off, of course, is innovation. Or so people claim.
The other side of the coin is also prevalent in telecom and other industries -- companies with a psycho executive board that has no concept of the time beyond next quarter. Too often, we hear stories of executives laying off a percentage of the workforce just to make the numbers that year. Or outsourcing things like IT or customer service because some MBA told them that these aren't "core competencies.' Try getting broadband service out of the telecom companies if you live out in the middle of nowhere, for example...it's not easy. No profit-oriented company wants to support it. This was part of the reason the phone monopoly existed, and why you still pay universal service fees on common-carrier service.
So, monopoly = bad. Unchecked competition = bad. Now what?? I would argue that #2 is better in a perfect world as long as we can reduce the focus on short-term gains. However, now that absolutely everyone is counting on the stock market/casino for their retirement, I can't see that happening. Because of that, #1 is still sometimes the best choice in our imperfect, corrupt world.