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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Well this was painful, and it’s relevant to how CIOs can thrive in the PC-plus era.

Office 2013 stopped working on my Windows 8 tablet – every Office application crashed immediately after being launched.

Neither of Office’s two repair processes helped. Un- and re-installing Office didn’t help. Reverting to the last breakpoint didn’t help either. The Windows 8 refresh process did, but required that I reinstall Office. Which then refused to activate.

According to the first Microsoft tech I worked with, Microsoft limits how many times Office can be reinstalled on the computer for which it is licensed — a restriction not mentioned in the EULA. Anyway, for a mere hundred fifty bucks he was willing to sell me an extended warranty, after which he would fix my problem. I asked to speak to his manager and he refused. Not a good showing.

The next day a different tech grasped that this was a licensing server problem, not an Office problem, and quickly fixed it.

Let’s imagine a CEO accepts the now-popular suggestion that cloud computing and BYOD mean it’s time to move IT into the business departments, which will all happily replace the company’s expensive and complicated enterprise applications with cloud-based SaaS alternatives.

So they do, cheerfully buying their PCs from Costco and their copies of Office through Amazon, while using Dropbox or Google Drive for shared storage. (Contrary to popular wisdom, by the way, they won’t move off of Office, because they can’t. The alternatives just can’t handle what the company’s more sophisticated employees need; also, many of them exchange documents, spreadsheets, and presentations with vendors and customers who need to see them in unscrambled form.)

This arrangement works just fine. Until, that is, something breaks, like for example, Office starts to crash for no apparent reason. Only now there’s no help desk to call, because IT has been divvied up among the business departments, and, by the way, the company no longer has an enterprise license because who’s going to take care of buying one?

Answer: While decommissioning IT, most likely everyone would have figured out the need for some IT, to handle things like the company’s networks, PC provisioning and end-user support.

Which is how CIOs can survive the current round of why-IT-doesn’t-matter-anymore thinking: Embrace it.

Start with the IT service catalog. While some of its proponents took the catalog metaphor off a cliff (yes, that was intentional), suggesting it include such niceties as pricing, the core idea … that what IT does should be public knowledge … is a pretty good idea, and, by the way, the more political the management culture, the better this idea is.

So here’s what you do. As part of the next IT strategic planning cycle, gather the company’s executives together and make the following speechlet:

We all know about the cloud. You all probably know that “bring your own device” is a reality, and that we in IT are now asked to support a lot of employee-owned technology. You might have read some of the forecasts that say IT spending outside of IT will and should be growing a lot faster than IT spending inside of IT.

The cloud and BYOD are real, they’re important, and they mean we need to re-think how we make IT happen in this company. We all know spending is a bad place to start. It’s an output variable, not an input variable. So here’s what I propose.

As an executive team, our job is to establish the principles we should use for deciding what should happen where. With these principles to work with, my team will wade through the IT service catalog and figure out how our new principles change how we as a company make each service happen. We’ll bring the items that change the most back to this committee for review.

Once we’ve figured out who’s going to do what, we can figure out what this means to the budget … and whether we should be moving staff, too.

Yes, this will be uncomfortable. It isn’t the first time new technologies have re-drawn the business/IT boundary, though. The electronic spreadsheet, for example, moved most small-scale development out of IT, just as VOIP moved the telephone system into it. All in all you’re better off leading this parade than you are trying to stop it from happening.

And as a fringe benefit, it gives you an opportunity to remind the company’s top executives of all those things IT does that nobody seems to appreciate.

It’s all good. Or at least, it’s better than any of your other alternatives.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

The U.S. system for issuing software patents is completely broken, and easily fixed.

The fix first: All Congress has to do is add these words to the existing body of patent legislation: Notwithstanding the above, no patents shall be issued for any software inventions and existing software patents shall be summarily revoked.

Disagree? Hold that thought.

Search for commentary on what’s broken about the software patent system and how to fix it and you’ll find no shortage (the best: Joel Spolsky’s “Victory Lap for Ask Patents,” Joel on Software 7/22/2013).

The widespread consensus is that the software patent system is broken.

Some numbers: The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) receives about 40,000 new applications a year for software patents, swamping the ability of patent inspectors to separate the few grains of wheat from the abundant chaff. Because seriously, based on your knowledge, experience, and judgment, do you think there are 40,000 non-obvious ideas each year about something new and interesting that software can do? Me neither.

Take a SWAG for the time each patent application requires. Call it maybe 100 hours of total effort on the part of the software engineers responsible for these “inventions,” the attorneys responsible for shepherding them through the process, and the patent examiners who have to process them?

This is a very conservative estimate, and it means the filing process alone drains four million hours of work each year out of the economy on the part of people who have some smarts and talent to offer.

Add the cost of litigation. The courts process more than 4,000 infringement cases each year, which on average cost about $2 million to defend, and about half of which are for software patents. That’s $4 billion a year in direct costs spent defending against software patent infringement cases, not including the large but impossible-to-estimate opportunity cost of time and effort not available for innovation.

Is this crippling? No, if you think it’s mostly spent by the likes of IBM, Oracle, Apple, and Microsoft. Also no in the context of the amounts spent on research and development: $4 billion a year is about 1 percent of U.S. R&D spending.

But in the context of where software innovation comes from, $4 billion is a lot of money, because a lot of software innovation comes from small players that can’t afford to defend themselves against patent trolls, and instead choose the cheaper alternative of buying them off.

But never mind all that. To understand why Congress should abolish all software patents, we all need to recognize a major and widespread misunderstanding about the purpose of the whole patent system.

Blame the legal community. They’ve taught us to use phrases like “Intellectual Property” to describe what patents and copyrights are supposed to protect.

As Orwell pointed out, control vocabulary and you control thought. Patents and copyrights actually have nothing at all to do with property rights. Don’t believe me? Here are the exact words as they appear in Section 8 of the United States Constitution: The Congress shall have power … to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries …

See the word “property”? Me neither. The purpose of having patents at all is to promote the progress of science (and, presumably, technology), not to protect property rights.

Look, more software innovation comes from the open source community these days than from anywhere else. The cloud relies heavily on open-source technologies. Nearly every new programming language that’s appeared in the last decade is open source. Most blogging is done using open-source toolkits.

And in open-source-land the only intellectual property protection software receives is protection from intellectual property protection.

It’s abundantly clear that the main impact patent protection has on software innovation is to stifle it.

The inference is inescapable. Software patents subvert the clear words of the Constitution — they are, in a word, unconstitutional.

Which in a better world would mean Congress wouldn’t even need to act, because the Supremes could take care of the whole problem in a single, easy-to-explain precedent.

Don’t hold your breath. Not because it’s unlikely, but because I’ve applied for a patent on breath-holding as a method for accelerating results.

You could defend yourself against the infringement suit I’ll otherwise file against you, but really, wouldn’t it be easier to just send me a check to make me go away?

* * *

Yes, I know. Unless you’re a member of Congress there’s nothing in here this week that’s of any practical value to you. Sorry. Next week for sure.

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