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The most amusing response to last week’s column was, “Our esteemed host, despite being gifted with intelligence and perception, is a liberal. And, when considering things political, liberals seem unable to actually look at the evidence.”

However else you interpret political events since the ascendency of the GOP in 2001, only a Fair and Balanced(TM) commentator would give political liberals exclusive credit for an unwillingness to consider evidence.

Not that it matters; I’m neither liberal nor conservative. I’m a member of the Competence Party.

The subject was giving tax cuts credit for tax revenue increases, which I used as an example of implausibility.

There’s a real connection to day-to-day business, since this proposition exemplifies a form of logic popular in business circles. I call it the Tom Peters Fallacy: Look at a success, identify something associated with the success you like, assert a causal relationship, and declare its universality.

Since I started this, I might as well finish it before getting down to business. Here’s my analysis:

  • Tax revenue increases have indeed followed all recent tax cuts, after a one to two year lag.
  • They’ve also followed all recent tax increases …
  • And all periods in which the tax rate didn’t change.
  • More significantly, all modern federal tax reductions have been accompanied by increases in federal spending.
  • And since all federal spending enters the private sector — either as wages to government employees or by paying the invoices of government contractors — it all generates taxable income.
  • Following all modern tax cuts the national debt grew faster than tax revenues.

The most plausible inference: Deficit spending rather than tax cuts is what increased tax revenues.

The relevance for you as an IT leader: Especially in complex dynamic systems (IT organizations are an example), cause and effect relationships are tricky to analyze. They usually have more than one cause, and operate in loops as well.

As long as we’re being political, here’s a news item that will cause many in IT security, and even more so many business travelers, to break out in cold sweats:

I’m quoting verbatim from “Travelers’ Laptops May Be Detained At Border,” by Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post Staff Writer, 8/1/2008:

Federal agents may take a traveler’s laptop computer or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed.

Also, officials may share copies of the laptop’s contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data decryption or other reasons, according to the policies, dated July 16 and issued by two DHS agencies, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist or a believer in J. Edgar Hoover’s legendary secret files to be concerned about this. All you have to do is provide support for international travelers.

The clearest risk is business impairment. To illustrate: One of your business travelers goes to Europe, does business, and returns. She documents the trip — maybe a write-up, maybe a spreadsheet, maybe a presentation, or some combination. Being prudent, she copies her files to a jump drive, just in case. At the border, DHS seizes her computer and jump drive. All of her documentation is unavailable for an unknown period of time.

Solution: Provide some means for remote back-up. At its most primitive it might mean e-mailing critical files as attachments. Or, it could mean providing an FTP site, or some public form of Internet backup you consider sufficiently secure.

Then, train, train, and train again. Employees discount low-probability risks as CYA activities. They might be right in this case, too — nobody knows the level of risk, and DHS isn’t likely to provide estimates of how many laptops they might sequester in an average week.

That’s the non-paranoid risk. If you’re paid to be paranoid, consider the possibility that one of the “private entities” with which DHS shares your data is a competitor.

Sure it’s unlikely. But then, security professionals are paid to be paranoid.

* * *

My colleague and good friend Ed Foster passed away last week, of an apparent heart attack. He was a fine journalist, a man of unimpeachable integrity, and showed courage in the issues and companies he took on. He was also a great guy. I liked him a lot.

Our industry will be the poorer for his absence.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Decades ago, Banana Republic was a mail order outfitter with a very cool catalog. It had lots of khaki; hats suitable for jungles and deserts; battered leather pouches, web belts and multi-pocketed vests for carrying the bits and pieces of paraphernalia you’d be likely to need when visiting snake or scorpion-infested territory; and the paraphernalia itself.

Somewhere along the way that formula stopped working, and Banana Republic turned itself into Just Another Clothing Store. It’s been successful, so from the perspective of fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders, it Did The Right Thing. But from the perspective of What’s The Point? Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?

There comes a time in the history of most companies when the old model stops working. Too often, the choices seem to be either vanishing from the landscape or, like Banana Republic, becoming a generic, personality-free enterprise.

When personal computers first burst onto the corporate scene, all of the players … and that includes Microsoft, but also Apple, Digital Research, Software Arts, Micro Pro, Novell, and Don Estridge’s PC division at IBM … were, at heart, revolutionaries.

They supported, not corporate America, but subversives inside corporate America — end-user-department innovators who needed to automate workgroup processes, model alternative business scenarios, or to otherwise solve small-scale challenges quickly, without going through the swimming-through-molasses procedures required by the corporation to get IT support.

The result was an outpouring of creativity that dramatically changed how businesses operate. For those readers too young to have lived through the transition, here’s just one of the changes, to serve as a proxy for all the rest: Before the PC, every manager had a personal secretary. Post-PC, many managers wouldn’t even know how to keep a secretary busy.

While Microsoft took a bare-knuckled approach to competitors, it kept sight of who its customer was — the individual corporate cost-center manager and end-user, not IT. That its operating system didn’t lend itself to central control, and its design was indifferent to security was not accidental. Corporate IT cares about control and security. End-users care about getting things done quickly, without bureaucratic overhead.

And then, somewhere along the way, the world changed and corporate IT became the customer. Microsoft adapted and thrived, but in much the way Banana Republic adapted and thrived — by forgetting what it was.

In microcosm: End-users wanted .bat files, interpreted BASIC and a macro “language” that wasn’t much more than a glorified keystroke automator. Corporate IT wanted standardization, restriction of administrative rights, and enough limitations on what end-users could do to assure the security of corporate information assets.

That was the end of .bat files and interpreted BASIC, while macro languages gave way to Visual Basic for Applications — a language learnable only by those who understand the philosophy of designing and coding software objects.

This is what is sad about some forms of success: Whether the subject is the personal computer industry, the Internet, Linux, or the Olympic games, it seems to drain the charm out of just about any business that achieves it.

And, there are times success results in abandoning a small but still-very-real market. The PC is, we’re told so often it has become tiresome, a business computer and not really a “personal” one. Which leaves open the question of who is going to serve the customers who used to look to Microsoft and the other small systems companies.

It won’t be Apple. Apple makes cool technology; not end-user-programmable technology. It probably won’t be the open source movement either. Those adept enough with technology to create open source solutions aren’t, for the most part, interested in creating tools simple and prosaic enough for average end-users.

The best candidate right now is (of course) Google. Its provides applications with novel capabilities, and because it delivers them via the browser, IT will have a hard time keeping them out of the enterprise.

In the meantime, Bill Gates has left the game, to devote his attention to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Foundation is genuinely admirable, both in its goals and its execution (and has redeemed Mrs. Gates from having been the force behind Microsoft Bob).

Except … is anyone else concerned about what the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation might turn into once Mr. and Mrs. Gates are gone? It’s an organization with a budget rivaling that of some governments, with no public governance or oversight.

I’m not entirely sure that in the long run this will prove to be an entirely good idea.

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