Network World has a Halloween themed slideshow up for the “2008 IT Industry Graveyard.” Interesting enough, but we’ve got to disagree with some of their choices. Some of them were declared dead prematurely… in fact, you could say that they were…
Buried Alive!
For example, the first one is Windows XP – with the idea that XP’s dominance will end simply because Microsoft has refused to sell XP directly to customers, or to OEMs that sell to customers. But though Microsoft tried to kill it, the reality of the situation is that XP is preferred by most customers over Vista, marketing campaigns aside, and if a customer has tried – and hates – Vista, he’ll resort to computer piracy (discounting those who resort to Linux). This is simple incentive: With piracy, you break the law once, and are annoyed only occasionally by anti-piracy measures. With an OS you don’t like, you’re just continually frustrated.
The ninth is “Comcast P2P traffic throttling.” I suppose, on a technically, Comcast isn’t planning to go against the ruling handed down by the FCC. So it’s dead as far as Comcast is concerned. But other companies still find P2P traffic throttling tempting, and even the entire nation of Australia is planning to implement blocks of “illegal” traffic. There is no opt-out list, so it’s a massive censorship plan… with a “false positive” rate of about 10%. I’m guessing that once this is fully implemented, people will scream the minute they find out that one of the “false positive” Web sites is business critical.
(If you ask me, whichever Aussie came up with this policy is up the boohai shooting pukakas.) And this is just one example of trying to control the content rather than controlling the quality of experience.
But it’s the second one that’s a big deal killer. “The IT Department?” Really? Yes. We’ve read Nick Carr’s book. We just don’t agree with the conclusions. Relying solely on SAAS means that you’re at the mercy of another company’s quality control, have no control over the performance of the network and no guarantees of five nines of uptime.
Now, don’t get me wrong – SAAS itself is great. But relying completely on anything is asking for trouble.
There are applications which save money when they’re leased as a service rather than managed by an in house IT department. But there are some applications which can’t be put on the cloud, and there are other applications which can be put on the cloud – but shouldn’t.
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