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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Recently I described some research I bumped into 20 years ago about a parrot that appeared to understand both the meaning of the words it mimicked and at least some elementary rules of grammar. Not having heard anything more about it, I concluded the research didn’t pan out and parrots are mere mimics after all.

My thanks to dozens of IS Survivalists who set me straight on this subject. Dr. Irene Pepperberg and Alex, her African Gray Parrot, are alive and talking to each other. It’s fascinating research. Bop over to http://www.cages.org/research/pepperberg/index.html to learn more about it. My apologies to any parrots I may have offended by likening them to the wrong class of human beings.

Offending human beings is OK, though. It’s your turn if you’re one of those who insist on giving the company what’s convenient rather than what’s important. You probably don’t recognize yourselves. To help you sort it out, you’re the ones most likely to explain that anytime you deliver something that’s inconvenient, it’s really a violation of IS standards that will further increase maintenance costs, cause PCs to require rebooting five times a day, and besides, the company really doesn’t need it anyway, regardless of what the person doing the work says.

The history of the PC is excellent evidence of this attitude, as an IS Survivalist who asks to remain anonymous pointed out in a recent letter: “Since the IS organization ignored us, we bought PCs to do our work, until the IS organization woke up and discovered their mainframes were dinosaurs.

“So the IS organization went to our management and took over our PCs and then demanded money to manage them. They then complained we used them for things other than functions their mainframes used to do, and since they never tried to understand what we do with them, they mismanaged them.

“The costs for PCs skyrocketed because of this mismanagement, so CIOs were invented to keep us from buying anything. Then the CIOs discovered our computers were becoming obsolete (because they wouldn’t let us replace them) and they mandated we replace them, but we had no money because we gave it all to the Information Systems people who squandered it on lousy PC support contracts.

“Instead of finding out what we need to do our work, and providing tools for us to use and standards for us to follow, IS people now dream up misguided, grandiose, expensive projects to do it all for us and leave no money to do the things that need to be done. And we, the user organizations, end up doing all the computer planning ourselves, developing our own standards, and inventing workarounds to the cumbersome system set up by the IS organization and the CIO.”

Overly harsh? Maybe. For example, I don’t think CIOs were invented to keep end-users from buying anything. That’s what corporate controllers are for. CIOs were invented to be comforting to business executives who had trouble relating to technical managers whose sole excuse for holding their jobs was that they got things done.

The first PCs to enter businesses were bought to enhance personal effectiveness. They lacked the really stupid features of the 3270 interface and they made end-users independent of IS (a huge factor in their popularity). If somebody sold software that would be worthwhile to the end-user, that end-user could simply buy the software, install it, and enjoy the benefits.

This is InfoWorld’s 20th anniversary year, and in those two decades IS has gained control of the “personal” computer. In doing so we’ve tried our best to make it as impersonal as possible.

When I attended the University of Minnesota, its management tried to encourage the use of mass transit, not by making mass transit more convenient but by reducing the number of parking spots. Students, faculty and administrators, however, preferred the device they could personally control — the automobile.

We can talk about how PCs are an enterprise resource all we want. We can’t, however, change human nature, and end-users don’t want an enterprise resource on their desks. They want a personal device that provides access to enterprise resources.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

According to Bernard Grun’s awesome The Timetables of History, King Herod died in the year 4 B.C. Christ was probably born the same year — if not he was born earlier, of course, since it was Herod’s call for a census that sent Joseph and Mary on their trip to Bethlehem.

All of you who still get riled up about when the millennium really starts should refocus your energy on fixing how we number years. Since the millennium began 2001 years after the year “-4” — 1997 AD if I’m doing my sums right — today’s column is really in the Oct. 26, 2002 edition of InfoWorld. The future is now.

Late in the real year 2000 I ran my first column trashing the Network Computer. Several years of marketing nonsense have muddied definitions almost beyond repair, so let’s try to restore some clarity to the situation: The NC, as defined by Larry Ellison, who coined the term, is a networked device that can execute Java code, connected to servers that download Java applications for local execution.

If local storage were expensive and bandwidth cheap, the NC would have made lots of sense. As it is, the whole attraction of the NC depended on two assumptions.

The first is that Microsoft will continue to avoid its DLL obligations. If you haven’t figured this out yet, Microsoft either created DLL hell deliberately or is so awesomely incompetent that our language lacks the words to describe its ineptitude. If Microsoft were to require registration of all DLLs and publication of their exact specifications, new versions of DLLs would not change functionality and DLL hell would be gone forever.

Of course, so would Microsoft’s ability to break competitor’s applications through the publication of new versions of DLLs, which is why I’ve concluded that this is the result of malfeasance rather than incompetence.

That’s one assumption. The second is the mirror of the first — it assumes someone would register all Java applications and applets, requiring that they all have fixed, published specifications. Otherwise we’d simply trade DLL hell for applet hell, and the sole advantage claimed for NCs — reduced cost of ownership — would vanish from the equation. Nobody has taken this essential step, and it’s pretty late in the game for the NC’s proponents to figure it out.

The IS Survival Guide didn’t have the clout to kill the NC — not in the real year 2000, not now.

Oracle has that clout. Since Oracle invented the concept of the NC, when it abandons the idea it’s safe to declare the NC completely dead. And the new version of Oracle’s ERP suite makes it clear the company has lost interest.

The new version, according to Oracle, is exciting because it migrates functionality back to big, centrally managed servers. It abandons client/server computing for a browser-based interface with all logic executing on the Web server.

If you like the idea of substituting WAN reliability and performance for replication, and you think Oracle has built a rich enough GUI into a browser, go ahead and buy it. Don’t, however, fall for the mistaken idea that if something is browser-based then it fits the NC model.

The point of the NC is for code — downloaded or cached — to execute on the desktop. The point of a browser is to provide an intelligent GUI presentation for code executing on a server. Yes, the browser can provide a home for Java applets, but Oracle’s centralized architecture isn’t suited for doing much on the desktop. That takes bandwidth, which means local, not centralized, servers.

Defenders of Oracle and the NC will rightly point out that the NC can host a browser, so Oracle’s ERP suite is compatible with an NC. That’s true, but no more relevant than the ability of the PC architecture to run Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) for hosting applications intended for NCs.

What’s relevant is that Oracle’s ERP team ignored the NC architecture in building this release. It isn’t built around Java applications downloading to desktop JVMs for execution.

And if Oracle’s ERP team ignores the NC architecture, who exactly is supposed to pay attention to it?

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