NT4 had its limitations, but the limitations are generally technical (crappy graphics without SP3 because it was written in '93, reboot often without SP4 for same reason...), not intentional.
2000 Has inconveniences, and they aren't technical. The tools are hidden through one more layer of shortcuts.
XP has problems. Stuff is better hidden, and default options are offensive. Hmmm, I'll check my C: drive, "warning, looking at this can damage windows," I want to do it anyway, hey there is nothing here, "yes I want to see contents of C: drive (after tracking down option), hey, windows directory isn't here...
I can deal with technical limitations, but stupid child-proofing pisses me off.
This is not what you do in American business. American business is a zero-sum game, where you do not care about anything except this quarters results, and how you can fake and spin them.
Ford made the mistake of paying employees enough so that they could become customers. He should have outsourced, raised prices, laid off people, and changed his core business to include stock market manipulation.
Trying to get good employees and sell goods and services is hard. Manipulating results and grabbing investors money is much easier. It also means that the people who do work suffer, not the people who mismanage.
How about continued maintenance? Most companies outsourced their web pages (or laid off the IT guys who put them together), and now they look silly. Even tech companies (eg Rogers) have non-functional pages, or ignored input (forms that submit to/dev/null, but inform clients that they will be contacted/served/helped).
Any time you start talking about core business you should check out Nortel's strategy:
1. We only care about our core business
2. We can change our core business any time.
You have to concentrate on what brings in money, but if you ignore the stuff that doesn't your company will die. HR may not be core business, but if you do it badly, or leave it to people outside your company (eg headhunters), you can expect failure.
Most forms of downsizing fail. Remember about 5-10 years ago when every department had a secretary? The secretary usually made peanuts considering the work she did, and s/he saved time for more highly paid employees. Now the secretaries have been downsized and you have coders, engineers, and other technical people writing stuff up (often in different standards or formats with varying quality of English) at 3-5 times the cost/hr. But it saved money, sure it did.
Outsourcing truly generic stuff, like payroll, works. Outsourcing company-specific stuff, like IT is foolish.
You are just assuming bad management. Managers who try to kill what they see as cost centers (purchasing, support...) are actively trying to lose clients and ignore potential profit. A bad IT department is a cost. A good one will save the company money and build inhouse apps to streamline and organize business.
Outsourced people may do projects cheaper, but they will never add to your company, they don't work for your company or know or care what you do. They fulfill the letter of the contract to the minimal extent and hope that means they can bill you for obvious unstated stuff.
It doesn't even work for those, actually. HP's clients are furious that HP outsourced their support. It already took time to get answers, now clients don't get answers, but they do get insulted.
Outsourcing programming does not work either. You get some code, but if you don't have a continuing relationship with the guy who wrote it or quality control there is no point. Most places I have even minimal respect for outsource menial stuff to co-op students. If you need it done right do it in-house.
Brings up an interesting point, though. Most companies I've seen outsource (eg Nortel and HP), have tried and failed to run things inhouse. They outsource because they figure it can't fail worse (or more expensively) than it did inhouse. They are wrong, of course, things can always get worse if you don't fix the real problem (bad HR, bad management, bad priorities).
Both of the previous points make sense, and they point out the fallacy of ignoring IT.
"If I reduce costs enough I can make money without selling any products" is a Dilbertism.
"The Mythical Man Month" made the point 20 years ago that there is no point in hiring cheap for IT projects. You are better off with a small group of good people who stay with the company than with cheap outside labor that could care less.
I would also like to hear of an example where outsourcing works. HP is still recovering from its attempt. Bell Canada's outsourcing encourages people to switch phone companies. I've been involved in outsourced software projects (as a unix admin, I just watched the chaos) and the code produced is crap because no one cares about quality, and everyone has an incentive to leave stuff in that needs to be fixed.
Un-outsourcing is difficult and costly (look at Nortel, billions in outsourcing, and now they don't even need the people they contracted in, they paid enough the outsourcing companies outsourced, and the quality of the doubly outsourced people was unbelievably low), and it involves blaming highly placed people, so it does not happen. If you can't be part of the solution there's lots of money in prolonging the problem (see demotivation).
Check out http://scriban.com/movabletype/2002_04_12.html. Declines in CD purchase correspond very nicely with RIAA mandated minimum advertised retail price increases. Why should people pay more for music (and the money does not usually make it to the artist who gets an advance and then gets ripped on royalties until they sue, assuming there are any) because the RIAA wants to defy economics? They charge more than production costs justify, and more than people are willing to pay. The RIAA is just begging to have someone outcompete them.
I think what people are trying to say is that bad people run the American gov't and promote this crap. Google "Guam sweatshops" to get an idea of what the US government does in places they control, but that don't vote. Take a look at what Bush talks about and what Rove, Cheney, Wolfowitz et al actually do. Watch Martha Stewart get reamed because she did not pay people off, and watch Kenny-boy walk with his cash because he did (the CEO/MBA administration can't investigate the scandal without bringing about impeachments that will remind us of the Reagan era).
American government sucks. It's bought and paid for by horrible people, and most people can't even be bothered to vote. Who cares what the American people are like when US representatives are vicious, corrupt, influence-peddlers?
Enron had the state department forcing foreign gov'ts (including India) to give them money in spite of lies and bad practices. This white house will take bribes over jobs any day.
I think this brings up a good point. Hardware may have improved, software development tools may have improved, the people writing software have gotten much worse. A few years ago most people who were in the computer industry were there because they knew something. Now they are there because they wanted money, some HR droid picked their CV out of a pile because of the acronyms, and some manager does not know enough to fire them.
Layoffs haven't helped either, generally the knowldegable people with higher salaries get booted first. Security vulnerabilities are up (including old stuff that has not been patched) and successful projects are down.
HP's hardware is somewhat faster than Sun's, but any advantage is given away by their crappy OS. HP systems are also less reliable, and their tech support stunk even before they outsourced it. I'll always remember the guy straining to push in a system board with the plastic pin protectors still on. He pushed at it and puzzled for an hour before we finally helped him out.
I heard that Sony CD players were initially screwed up because they asked rock musicians for opinions, and tuned accordingly. The musicians were pretty deaf because they played high volume shows. The musicians could only hear high and squeaky, so they liked high and squeaky CD players.
Funny, I find being able to pull off keyboard combinations an incredible advantage on most games including SF II. It takes some adjustment but it is way easier and faster to pull off moves with a keyboard.
Since you can change the administrator password with a linux boot disk and some utilities (I've used it, it works) booting with windows CD-ROMS is not a major bug.
http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/bootdisk.h tml is one version, there are many. You have to know/guess which partition is the windows partition.
In the one course I failed (half the class got Fs, a quarter got D's) the teacher's boss told students of this conversation he had with the teacher (seriously bad teacher):
Department head: why did you fail so many students? 3/4 of the class got D or less.
Teacher: it's your fault!
Department head: my fault?
Teacher: every year you put all the bad students in my class! Every year!
The teacher had tenure, he is still there, failing to teach his course. I learned from the experience. When I had bad teachers I stopped going to class and studied the text book. So I did learn something from him.
Boeing hires people to design, prototype and build planes. People do not design planes and go to Boeing to have them produced.
The music industry is starting to create bands (Britney, backstreet boys, Milli Vanilli...) with music made by unattractive artists and lip-synched by pretty artists, but they do not create music.
The music industry looks for people who are already producing music. They take what they find, pretty it up a little, package it and flog it to the masses.
Marketing has more value than content creation in America. Just ask the near-bankrupt contract company that manufactures hardware that M$ stamps a brand on. The brand stamping is a major cash cow for M$, the production company is in the red.
Design today is based on normal curves. Nothing will fail after 8 miles, but it is easy enough to design a car model such that 95% will survive the 5 year warranty with less than X$ in warranty repair, but 75% will not last more than 5.5 years without major repair, and 50% will not last 10 years. It's all based on money. The normal curve design is easy, easiest Mech Eng course I had in four years.
Aircraft design has different priorities. Aircraft need frequent, detailed, maintenance. I would fly on major carriers without qualm, but the little guys (ValueJet, Nation Air) will cut corners. You CANNOT cut corners on aircraft maintenance for any plane designed after 1970 unless you enjoy crashes.
My experience with end-of-company auctions is that furniture is cheap, but anything with a power supply goes for more than it is worth. Resellers bid until the price is reasonable, and they take the lot if they get it. People who don't know what hardware is worth get carried away and bid more than they could buy the stuff for new.
Doesn't apply to high-end hardware (Sun boxen go relatively cheap), but only high-end stuff goes cheap. Sun workstation, expensive, Sun tape robot, massive storage system, or massive server, cheap relative to real price (who has $20 000 to bid, other than resellers?).
I'd be more upset about the $2 billion M$ got in the Bush tax cut. No help to the economy or to anyone, really, now M$ has $39 billion in the bank instead of $37 billion. Ahh, but it's worth %6.67 to every American for them to have the extra 2 bil.
O'Reilly has a good book on backups. It goes into most solutions, tar, Amanda, dd, dump etc. on several platforms. It also stresses bare metal restores, which is a good thing. I worked with an admin whose backup/restore strategy was:
1. Backup / on tape 2. Rebuild system with CD 3. Restore / from tape over running OS 4. Try and fail to boot system
I never saw him get this to work, but he would not listen to my suggestions. On the systems I backed up I either created bootable tapes or booted single-user from CD before restoring from tape, and this actually worked.
You have to consider the "minimum advertised price" crap too. Every time the labels raise prices sales drop. The big guys don't care, the small guys die.
A CD costs nothing relative to tape, LP... in terms of production. The labels have a major cash cow, lower costs, higher profits, and they are still whining. I'm stunned that so many people will pay $20 for a CD.
How many people would bother to download and burn if CDs cost $6? How many more CDs would people buy? Judging by most of the people I know in the used places when you can actually get cheap stuff I would say loads. At a few cents a CD it might be worthwhile, too. But it is easier for the labels to do the Apple thing, and raise profits on a small number of units.
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2000 Has inconveniences, and they aren't technical. The tools are hidden through one more layer of shortcuts.
XP has problems. Stuff is better hidden, and default options are offensive. Hmmm, I'll check my C: drive, "warning, looking at this can damage windows," I want to do it anyway, hey there is nothing here, "yes I want to see contents of C: drive (after tracking down option), hey, windows directory isn't here...
I can deal with technical limitations, but stupid child-proofing pisses me off.
Ford made the mistake of paying employees enough so that they could become customers. He should have outsourced, raised prices, laid off people, and changed his core business to include stock market manipulation.
Trying to get good employees and sell goods and services is hard. Manipulating results and grabbing investors money is much easier. It also means that the people who do work suffer, not the people who mismanage.
IT REQUIRES continuity.
1. We only care about our core business
2. We can change our core business any time.
You have to concentrate on what brings in money, but if you ignore the stuff that doesn't your company will die. HR may not be core business, but if you do it badly, or leave it to people outside your company (eg headhunters), you can expect failure.
Most forms of downsizing fail. Remember about 5-10 years ago when every department had a secretary? The secretary usually made peanuts considering the work she did, and s/he saved time for more highly paid employees. Now the secretaries have been downsized and you have coders, engineers, and other technical people writing stuff up (often in different standards or formats with varying quality of English) at 3-5 times the cost/hr. But it saved money, sure it did.
Outsourcing truly generic stuff, like payroll, works. Outsourcing company-specific stuff, like IT is foolish.
Outsourced people may do projects cheaper, but they will never add to your company, they don't work for your company or know or care what you do. They fulfill the letter of the contract to the minimal extent and hope that means they can bill you for obvious unstated stuff.
Outsourcing programming does not work either. You get some code, but if you don't have a continuing relationship with the guy who wrote it or quality control there is no point. Most places I have even minimal respect for outsource menial stuff to co-op students. If you need it done right do it in-house.
Brings up an interesting point, though. Most companies I've seen outsource (eg Nortel and HP), have tried and failed to run things inhouse. They outsource because they figure it can't fail worse (or more expensively) than it did inhouse. They are wrong, of course, things can always get worse if you don't fix the real problem (bad HR, bad management, bad priorities).
"If I reduce costs enough I can make money without selling any products" is a Dilbertism.
"The Mythical Man Month" made the point 20 years ago that there is no point in hiring cheap for IT projects. You are better off with a small group of good people who stay with the company than with cheap outside labor that could care less.
I would also like to hear of an example where outsourcing works. HP is still recovering from its attempt. Bell Canada's outsourcing encourages people to switch phone companies. I've been involved in outsourced software projects (as a unix admin, I just watched the chaos) and the code produced is crap because no one cares about quality, and everyone has an incentive to leave stuff in that needs to be fixed.
Un-outsourcing is difficult and costly (look at Nortel, billions in outsourcing, and now they don't even need the people they contracted in, they paid enough the outsourcing companies outsourced, and the quality of the doubly outsourced people was unbelievably low), and it involves blaming highly placed people, so it does not happen. If you can't be part of the solution there's lots of money in prolonging the problem (see demotivation).
Check out http://scriban.com/movabletype/2002_04_12.html. Declines in CD purchase correspond very nicely with RIAA mandated minimum advertised retail price increases. Why should people pay more for music (and the money does not usually make it to the artist who gets an advance and then gets ripped on royalties until they sue, assuming there are any) because the RIAA wants to defy economics? They charge more than production costs justify, and more than people are willing to pay. The RIAA is just begging to have someone outcompete them.
American government sucks. It's bought and paid for by horrible people, and most people can't even be bothered to vote. Who cares what the American people are like when US representatives are vicious, corrupt, influence-peddlers?
Enron had the state department forcing foreign gov'ts (including India) to give them money in spite of lies and bad practices. This white house will take bribes over jobs any day.
I think this brings up a good point. Hardware may have improved, software development tools may have improved, the people writing software have gotten much worse. A few years ago most people who were in the computer industry were there because they knew something. Now they are there because they wanted money, some HR droid picked their CV out of a pile because of the acronyms, and some manager does not know enough to fire them. Layoffs haven't helped either, generally the knowldegable people with higher salaries get booted first. Security vulnerabilities are up (including old stuff that has not been patched) and successful projects are down.
They already price with the expectation that you will copy the album for four friends. If you don't copy it you are just messing up their accountants.
HP's hardware is somewhat faster than Sun's, but any advantage is given away by their crappy OS. HP systems are also less reliable, and their tech support stunk even before they outsourced it. I'll always remember the guy straining to push in a system board with the plastic pin protectors still on. He pushed at it and puzzled for an hour before we finally helped him out.
I heard that Sony CD players were initially screwed up because they asked rock musicians for opinions, and tuned accordingly. The musicians were pretty deaf because they played high volume shows. The musicians could only hear high and squeaky, so they liked high and squeaky CD players.
Funny, I find being able to pull off keyboard combinations an incredible advantage on most games including SF II. It takes some adjustment but it is way easier and faster to pull off moves with a keyboard.
Since you can change the administrator password with a linux boot disk and some utilities (I've used it, it works) booting with windows CD-ROMS is not a major bug. http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/bootdisk.h tml is one version, there are many. You have to know/guess which partition is the windows partition.
If they educate all of their customers about computers they will never sell another unit.
In the one course I failed (half the class got Fs, a quarter got D's) the teacher's boss told students of this conversation he had with the teacher (seriously bad teacher): Department head: why did you fail so many students? 3/4 of the class got D or less. Teacher: it's your fault! Department head: my fault? Teacher: every year you put all the bad students in my class! Every year! The teacher had tenure, he is still there, failing to teach his course. I learned from the experience. When I had bad teachers I stopped going to class and studied the text book. So I did learn something from him.
Maybe Harry should learn to write coherent sentences before he moves on from his current enterprise.
Boeing hires people to design, prototype and build planes. People do not design planes and go to Boeing to have them produced.
The music industry is starting to create bands (Britney, backstreet boys, Milli Vanilli...) with music made by unattractive artists and lip-synched by pretty artists, but they do not create music.
The music industry looks for people who are already producing music. They take what they find, pretty it up a little, package it and flog it to the masses.
Marketing has more value than content creation in America. Just ask the near-bankrupt contract company that manufactures hardware that M$ stamps a brand on. The brand stamping is a major cash cow for M$, the production company is in the red.
Design today is based on normal curves. Nothing will fail after 8 miles, but it is easy enough to design a car model such that 95% will survive the 5 year warranty with less than X$ in warranty repair, but 75% will not last more than 5.5 years without major repair, and 50% will not last 10 years. It's all based on money. The normal curve design is easy, easiest Mech Eng course I had in four years.
Aircraft design has different priorities. Aircraft need frequent, detailed, maintenance. I would fly on major carriers without qualm, but the little guys (ValueJet, Nation Air) will cut corners. You CANNOT cut corners on aircraft maintenance for any plane designed after 1970 unless you enjoy crashes.
My experience with end-of-company auctions is that furniture is cheap, but anything with a power supply goes for more than it is worth. Resellers bid until the price is reasonable, and they take the lot if they get it. People who don't know what hardware is worth get carried away and bid more than they could buy the stuff for new. Doesn't apply to high-end hardware (Sun boxen go relatively cheap), but only high-end stuff goes cheap. Sun workstation, expensive, Sun tape robot, massive storage system, or massive server, cheap relative to real price (who has $20 000 to bid, other than resellers?).
I'd be more upset about the $2 billion M$ got in the Bush tax cut. No help to the economy or to anyone, really, now M$ has $39 billion in the bank instead of $37 billion. Ahh, but it's worth %6.67 to every American for them to have the extra 2 bil.
O'Reilly has a good book on backups. It goes into most solutions, tar, Amanda, dd, dump etc. on several platforms. It also stresses bare metal restores, which is a good thing. I worked with an admin whose backup/restore strategy was:
1. Backup / on tape
2. Rebuild system with CD
3. Restore / from tape over running OS
4. Try and fail to boot system
I never saw him get this to work, but he would not listen to my suggestions. On the systems I backed up I either created bootable tapes or booted single-user from CD before restoring from tape, and this actually worked.
And it did not kill anyone, just injured a nazgul.
You have to consider the "minimum advertised price" crap too. Every time the labels raise prices sales drop. The big guys don't care, the small guys die. A CD costs nothing relative to tape, LP... in terms of production. The labels have a major cash cow, lower costs, higher profits, and they are still whining. I'm stunned that so many people will pay $20 for a CD. How many people would bother to download and burn if CDs cost $6? How many more CDs would people buy? Judging by most of the people I know in the used places when you can actually get cheap stuff I would say loads. At a few cents a CD it might be worthwhile, too. But it is easier for the labels to do the Apple thing, and raise profits on a small number of units.