Industry Commentary – Page 306 – IS Survivor Publishing

Technology losers for 2001 (first appeared in InfoWorld)

This week, InfoWorld celebrates the best technologies of the past year.

But that’s way too obvious: It’s XML — simple, elegant, and its adoption has been fast, broad and deep.

Boooriiinng. It took no insight to figure this out. It barely required a pulse.

So we’re going to focus on worst ideas of 2001. InfoWorld’s focus is on technologies this year, not individual vendors and products, which means I won’t get to (for example) include:

Palm for its complete lack of innovation. When all interesting innovation for this platform came from Handspring and Sony, for shame.

Novell for its Al Gore-like ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Never has such superior technology (NDS that is, although Gore’s animatronics were phenomenal …) suffered under such consistently inept marketing.

Microsoft, of course, also deserves opprobrium for releasing Active Directory as catch-up to NDS rather than leap-frog technology, but that’s really a 1999 carry-over.

Apple, which still hasn’t figured out that when you’re a market underdog you need marketshare and mindshare, not margins. Macs need to cost less than equivalent Wintel PCs, not twice as much. Despite the superiority of Mac OS X, Apple still deserves to fail.

UCITA’s backers, for stuffing it through an egregiously biased process. If you have any doubt that we’ve entered an era where big-lie propaganda is business-as-usual, read the press releases defending this bag of muck, and try not to gag.

But our focus is on bad technologies, not individual products or companies. The clear winner would be Fat Network Architectures (the more accurate name for “thin client”), only that’s an old issue. Fat network architectures provide convenience to providers while diminishing usability. They’re only appropriate for applications whose deployment is broad but whose use is occasional.

Another candidate is Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) security. EAI itself is incredibly important right now. But with few exceptions, EAI systems must have superuser privileges, which means they add yet another, independent layer of security administration. (Incredibly, Microsoft seems to have gotten EAI security right in Biztalk, which reportedly passes through already-established access rights.)

The runner-up is the Application Service Provider (ASP). ASPs, which were never anything more than rehashed timesharing service bureaus retooled onto fat network architectures (not a promising start!), never figured out that technology is now built into the core of the modern enterprise. Integration — a critical business priority (the reason EAI is so important) — is hard enough when a business runs all of its systems on its own computers. The ASP model makes it nearly impossible.

The clear winner, though, is Internet Attached Storage (IAS). At least fat network architectures are sound engineering. IAS, on the other hand, separates data storage from data processing, connecting them through the Internet at speeds and latencies that are a tiny fraction of LAN, bus or channel attachment.

I’m quite certain IAS is a winner when viewed through the distorted lens of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). I’m equally sure that if you move a production database to IAS, what used to be overnight batch will turn into something quite different.

Between now and the time it’s finished running, you’ll have had time to fix the Y3K bug.

New Year’s non-predictions (first appeared in InfoWorld)

Draw your own conclusions.

In my December 18th column I asserted that Bush and Gore should both be embarrassed about their total lack of leadership during the Florida election fiasco. Quite a few angry readers, all politically conservative supporters of our new president, complained. Every one accused me of being partisan on the subject. Most of them were unpleasant. Many repeated almost verbatim the most anti-factual of Republican propaganda. (A distinction: Much of the Republican propaganda was in direct opposition to the facts, and vitriolic besides. The Democratic propaganda was simply preposterous. Chalk it up to a difference in style.)

No Gore supporters griped about my being a Republican partisan. Go figure.

Other correspondents expressed concern that I inappropriately strayed into political commentary in an IT publication. Fear not. Leadership is a frequent topic in this column, and while I’ll continue to draw on current events to illustrate leadership issues, I’ll also continue to be bipartisan when I disparage our political so-called leadership. In other words, I won’t ever mention that more than $40 million worth of investigation successfully proved Bill Clinton cheated on his wife and lied about it in court without also mentioning that his two predecessors — Reagan and Bush Sr. — sanctioned the sale of illicit drugs to American citizens to finance an illegal war against the legitimate government of Nicaragua.

American values being what they are, most appear to consider Clinton’s crime the more deplorable of the two.

Which is relevant to this week’s prediction. But first …

I’d originally planned to make a bunch of New Year’s predictions this week. It’s something of a January tradition after all.

Sadly, I don’t have anything interesting to predict. The trends that will play out this year started awhile ago. 2001 will see the continuing e-enablement of business, not a transformation to something unrecognizable. Radically new business models won’t flourish: ASPs won’t enjoy triple-digit growth; auctions won’t become the dominant means for setting price in either the B2B or B2C world; digital exchanges will mostly find success by scaling back to become transaction clearinghouses.

2001 will be a year of consolidation and incremental improvement. In part, this will be the result of economic jitters. It’s also due to simple fatigue — there’s a limit to the amount of radical change society can eat before it has to stop and do some digesting.

My one new prediction is social, although it will affect the world of business: The Bobby Knight syndrome will start to recede.

You recall Bobby Knight, Indiana’s dear departed basketball coach. Knight behaved as if winning absolved all sins. He threw chairs, abused office staff, and assaulted those who made him angry (not a difficult task), attributing all criticism to jealousy. If it were just Knight we could chalk this up to a psychological case study. Sadly, Knight enjoys a huge coterie of supporters who agree with his philosophy that results are all that matter.

Every time you hear someone say, “We do whatever it takes,” you’re hearing an echo of Bobby Knight, because sometimes, “whatever it takes” is (or should be) completely unacceptable. I’m guessing Americans have reached their limit and are ready to say, “We don’t want you do to whatever it takes. We insist that you respect some boundaries, and only win if you can stay inside them.”

Or maybe it’s just a hope.