Ask Slashdot: What Will IT Look Like In 10 Years? 444
An anonymous reader writes "The IT industry is a lot different than it was 10 years ago; it underwent a huge boom in terms of labor and services required to keep up with the times. Now, we are entering a consolidation phase. The cloud makes it easier for companies to host e-mail, so now instead of organizations having their own Exchange guy, they will outsource it to the cloud. Instead of having a bunch of network engineers, they will deploy wireless and no longer need cabling or current levels of network engineering services. What do you think the long-term consequences of this will be? What skills do you think will be useful in 10 years? Is IT going to put its own out of work, like we did with the post office and libraries?"
Questions from the original article... (Score:4, Interesting)
Gotta admit, Steve Jobs said it best: (Score:5, Interesting)
Steve Jobs in his last single interview with Walt Mossberg had a very good example of what is happening with IT right now. It basically goes like this:
The very first cars were trucks. The very first chariots humans built were to hawl food from A to B. They were utility vehicles. Only later, when the vehicles of each age became a commodity, did they turn into everyday passenger vehicles that had a certain mass-availability.
The computer now is doing the same thing, moving from being a tool for workers to being a commodity for everyday use by everyone, not just experts. Experts like us don't like that very much right now, but that's the way it goes. Bizarre IBM age keyboard layouts are finally becoming a thing of the past, UIs are becoming more task focused and the need for abstraction whilst using a 'Post-PC Device' is demising quickly. Even the mouse and the file-system is quickly fading into a specialist tool.
Everyday commodity computing is basically going the way of the iPad.
IT will move to a stronger separation of end-user and expert computing. Workstation-Laptops will become more rare and expensive, purpose built for programmers and admins to use them whilst tablet and netback devices will become a dime a dozen in all kinds of varieties. People won't look for actually performance but for brands of services. Sales talks like this: 'Can my device Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Netflix?' 'No, it can only Twitter and Facebook, you need an upgrade to Netflix with it.' will become normal at the HiFi-Store or carrier outlet.
Some vendors like Apple, Nintendo or Sony will have a strong vertical lock-in with cushy comfort solutions that require upgrading every 3rd year, others will be more open and more utility focused.
Carriers will get into bed with hardware, software and service brands more often. I expect branding and mindshare to become even more important than today in many places. To emphasize: I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft moved to the Linux kernel in a few years time and nobody would really care or even notice.
Our kind will specialize more and the rich-client web will get a new boost - as it is happening right now - because the platform diversity mess will be very much 1980ies style also like it is right now again.
All in all I'm not to scared about the way of IT, crazy DRM & patents, Human Rights and eavesdropping laws aside.
It's going to be just as interesting then as it is today.
My 2 cents.
Re:Questions from the original article... (Score:2, Interesting)
What exactly does "This." mean? (It seems redundant)
It seems to be a recent colloquialism roughly equivalent to "hear hear" i.e. expressing agreement and support for the position of the previous commenter. It is a little grating but if it continues to catch on then presumably it will start to sound more natural.
Although it might seem redundant with a comment that goes on to express agreement anyway, it probably actually can be a useful signal of where the paragraph is going, so the reader is following it with an expectation of a supportive statement rather than a dispute. Similar to starting with "I agree", "I disagree" or even just "Yes" or "No".
Re:Wireless = less network engineers? (Score:5, Interesting)
And another factor with wireless is the limited bandwidth. When too many are using wireless at the same time in the same location things slows down considerably.
Even if you have 100Mbps but you share it with 20 people you may end up with 5Mbps. Wireless is also sensitive to electric noise, which makes things worse.
So wired networking will be the primary alternative even in the future. Especially considering that the applications we run today require more and more bandwidth.
Re:Flawed premise (Score:4, Interesting)
However the cloud won't be able to compensate for the network latency when accessing data. This can be a major issue. Just going cloud-based isn't the perfect solution for everything.
Re:IT has always been cyclic; no surprises coming (Score:4, Interesting)
But IT'S OFTEN NOT DISTRIBUTED.
It's often just a virtualized single server, running on a single server on Amazon's rack. And Amazon doesn't care about uptime for that individual server, because it's a cloud, and you shouldn't be so dumb as to run a service on a single server, despite that being what people are using it for.
Yes, it was a great idea - write everything in a distributed way, and it can be omnipresent. Like a cloud. But only if you wear the cost of doing it the right way, which nobody does.
Re:IT has always been cyclic; no surprises coming (Score:1, Interesting)
Unfortunately, there's MBA types counting beans and looking for places to save money. They look at IT and see a cost center; IT adds nothing to the bottom line.
- how is that unfortunate? Why shouldn't money be saved?
In competing markets and with actual competition comes the market pressure to reduce costs, so money must be saved and what I predict is that IT will have to become more and more resilient and survive with smaller budgets in those companies that have departments, and in reality challenges that are posed normally are met with solutions.
In fact I expect more interesting development in terms of productivity to come out of IT in near future, as people who work in this industry finally understand that they need to do something if they actually want to have any lives left to live at all instead of spending and average of 10 hours at work 6 days a week.
Innovation does not come without pressure, pressure and challenges bring it about and if you think it's only IT that the Accounting is looking at to save costs, you are way off base. Accounting is there to push people in the entire company to be more productive, which means to come up with solutions that allow them to be more productive. Better and smarter tools, that's what I expect the IT to have due to all this economic pressure.
Asymmetry, crime, contracts, uniforms = dead cloud (Score:2, Interesting)
I've been in cloud computing for about two decades. The marketing and buzzwords have changed, but not much else.
The fundamental problems with "cloud services" is asymmetry, crime, contracts, and uniforms.
Asymmetry is when you're losing $10K/day in revenue because emails from China are getting blocked, and your $19.95/month provider literally can't afford to fix it. Based on their projected profit, and cost of new sales, they're financially better off disposing of your account, complete with you paying an early termination fee. There is no such thing as "commodity service". You pay a cloud provider $20/month you get $20/month of service and not one penny more. You pay a local admin $7K/month you get $7K/month of service. If you're only getting $20/mo of service for $7000/mo of salary, that is a profound management failure. Outsourcing merely means the PHB will find a new way to cause $7K/mo of damage to the bottom line. Better the devil you know than the devil you don't.
Crime is a big issue. Inside the USA things are every approaching 1984 soviet lifestyle... but cross international boundaries and its like dealing with pirates hundreds of years ago (in some cases, literally). If you outsource to China, you better be prepared to move everything including management team there, like recently happened to GE medical imaging, which is no longer a US company. If you have non-technical managers signing technical contracts, they literally might not even know they're giving away the store, until its too late. Managers in the USA are coddled because corporate and govt interests have merged in a fascist system here... its not like that when you cross international boundaries, its more like the wild west. Good luck, softie east coast city frat boy, in a border town of saloons, stagecoach robbers, and gunslingers (in some cases, literally).
Another problem is contracts. Non-technical users are too dumb to intelligently sign one, so they'll get ripped off. If you have a weak contract, you'll get identity thefted or have to pay for a lifetime. If you have a strong contract with endless credit checks, competitive bidding, DUN number verification, auditing, etc, you'll have a three month outage while switching to new providers... can your business survive 3 months without a fileserver or email? If so, you shouldn't be wasting the money on it to begin with.
Uniforms is the biggest problem. Back in ye old days, blue collar factories sometimes / often supplied uniforms for their wage slaves. In this enlightened era where the only jobs are selling insurance and homes to each other, we are expected to provide for ourselves, and show up at work appropriately clothed rather than nude and expect the boss to pay to dress us. For a decade we've had endless complaints about having to carry a crappy corporate issued locked down phone plus your "real" personal phone. I think the days of a company issued computer / phone are about as numbered as the days of a company issued pair of uniform pants... it'll never quite go away, but the vast majority of workers will simply provide their boss with their personal email addrs, and their personal cell phone number, and that'll be the end of that. Carry your personal laptop into work, plug into what amounts to a DMZ or extremely fast internet pipe, VNC or equivalent into some apps, firefox into other apps... Contractors already live this life, wage slaves will soon. The idea of my employer of the moment selecting my cell phone is frankly weirder than the idea of my employer of the moment selecting my business casual attire. My boss does not buy my socks, nor my car, and soon, not my cellphone and laptop.
Re:Questions from the original article... (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean, really -- other than Larry and Sergei reading our mail, there really isn't much of a downside.
LOL how about this
Now we don't have that mystery missing-man-day every month when something inevitably goes wrong
No no no. What you mean is now you CAN NOT spend a man-day when something inevitably goes wrong. Just toss your hands up in the air, shrug the shoulders, and go home. Don't confuse lack of ability to control with lack of need to control.
I've been involved on the service provider side of what is now called "cloud computing" for about two decades. You, as a customer, are worth exactly what you pay us, adjusted somewhat by cost of new sales. Not a penny more, not a penny less. Lets say, $50/mo for outsourced email. We could and did simply drop "expensive" customers. You lose a $10M contract because email from .hk was getting blocked? Oh I feel so sorry, if I'm in a good mood, here's a credit for one month of service, buh bye, if I'm in a bad mood, here's a credit for one email's worth of service, lets say $1, buh bye. Bug us "too much" and unless there are marketing implications, we drop you like a hot potato. At $50/month and $75K/yr for me, we simply could not afford to provide much 1 on 1 help to customers. Our support budget was about 10% so every month we could afford to help each customer about $5 worth, which at about $40/hr means just enough time to hear your monthly problem explanation and me to tell you that unless its a major systemic failure, that was a nice anecdote, now you're SOL, please go away... What happens after you go away is our profits go up, what happens to you... well frankly we didn't have any reason to care. I would assume some of our more "internet focused" customers who we gave the internet-death-penalty simply went out of business. The folks who didn't depend on the internet services we sold, probably had their profits go up, minus our hefty early termination fees of course. Either way, anyone using our outsourced services more or less universally ended up better off after contract termination. That's why I'm not in that line of work anymore.
Based on history, it'll turn around again (Score:4, Interesting)
The trend in IT since day 1 has been to alternate waves of centralization (Mainframe, client-server, cloud) with waves of decentralization (PC, workstation). Really, it'll probably be like it is now, just more so. Firms with very simple needs will use cloud-based mail and sharing solutions, firms with more need for customization and/or performance will run their own servers. If they are large enough to justify the expense, they'll hire an IT staff, otherwise they will use companies like mine when needed. Computers themselves will still need support, even if all the data is in a server farm somewhere. Not to mention that cloud computing assumes Internet that's always there and always working.
Wireless will become more important, but wired will still be used when viable because it's faster and more reliable (plus every wired computer is one less tapping shared spectrum). Windows will continue to suck less, Macs the same, and Linux will keep being just a couple of years away from desktop usage.
The wildcard is the emergence of the iPad (not tablets in general yet - the market so far has decreed that no tablet other than the iPad matters thus far). iPads alone won't redefine the IT business, but if any other platform takes hold to even close to the degree the iPad has thus far then tablets may finally become a viable part of the IT environment - ant that has the potential to redefine how applications are used and support is provided.
the chump U.S. IT workers (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wireless = less network engineers? (Score:4, Interesting)
Hate to say it, but I have a hunch that as far as actual IT goes, if stuff goes more and more to a) wireless infrastructure and b) cloud computing - then the role of "IT department" will come down to not much more than TSA agents - underqualified boobs who get ultimate authority.
IT will troubleshoot the desktop systems by rebooting, then if that doesn't work replace it with an identical disposable appliance and send back the "defective" unit for recycling.
Since everything is on the cloud, the only other task for "IT" is to make sure the internet connection stays up and - here's the TSA part - police internet usage to ensure compliance with corporate internet and computer use policy. IT Tools will be comprised of keylogging, remote screen viewing and internet access logs. Noncompliance will be dealt with by more
IT will be staffed by pimply faced youths who are susceptible to power trips and a mean streak.
The IT director will herd the thugs and needs no qualification other than being able to negotiate the company needs with cloud service vendors who - generally - are good at telling companies what they need.
Computing will become not much more than another utility dealt with by the maintenance department.
Bleak? Too pessimistic? Inaccurate? Get back to me in ten years.
Re:Questions from the original article... (Score:1, Interesting)
How can u trow a team that u dont have? If u have it, why u were not using it?
Re:IT has always been cyclic; no surprises coming (Score:3, Interesting)
I found that quote quite amusing back in 1993 when most of you were still being bullied by the guy who (these days) is ringing up your purchases at WalMart.
The quote is:
One of the questions that comes up all the time is: How enthusiastic is our support for UNIX? Unix was written on our machines and for our machines many years ago. Today, much of UNIX being done is done on our machines. Ten percent of our VAXs are going for UNIX use. UNIX is a simple language, easy to understand, easy to get started with. It's great for students, great for somewhat casual users, and it's great for interchanging programs between different machines. And so, because of its popularity in these markets, we support it. We have good UNIX on VAX and good UNIX on PDP-11s. It is our belief, however, that serious professional users will run out of things they can do with UNIX. They'll want a real system and will end up doing VMS when they get to be serious about programming. With UNIX, if you're looking for something, you can easily and quickly check that small manual and find out that it's not there. With VMS, no matter what you look for -- it's literally a five-foot shelf of documentation -- if you look long enough it's there. That's the difference -- the beauty of UNIX is it's simple; and the beauty of VMS is that it's all there. -- Ken Olsen, president of DEC, DECWORLD Vol. 8 No. 5, 1984