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from the left-for-dead-when-InfoWorld-folded dept.
Bob Cringely is running a new prediction at https://www.cringely.com/2020/03/25/2020-brings-the-death-of-it/
2020 Brings the Death of IT
IT — Information Technology — grew out of something we called MIS — Management Information Systems — but both meant a kid in a white shirt who brought you a new keyboard when yours broke. Well, the kid is now gone, sent home with everyone else, and that kid isn't coming back... ever. IT is near death, fading by the day. But don't blame COVID-19 because the death of IT was inevitable. This novel coronavirus just made it happen a little quicker.
I mentioned the switch from MIS to IT because that name change presaged the events I am describing here. Management Information Systems was an artifact of big business, where corporate life was managed rather than lived. Information Technology happened when MIS escaped into the wild. MIS meant office buildings and Local Area Networks while IT includes home workers in their pajamas which, frankly, describes me at this precise moment.
To quote the immortal Al Mandel (why am I the only one who ever quotes the immortal Al?) "the step after ubiquity is invisibility." IT was the last visible vestige of MIS and now it, too, is gone.
Another recent post has an interesting view of venture capital: https://www.cringely.com/2020/03/25/prediction-covid-19-will-kill-a-ton-of-startups-or-so-it-will-seem-as-vcs-pull-back/
(Score: 3, Insightful) by meustrus on Monday March 30 2020, @04:21PM (2 children)
Then you're talking to the wrong people. Anybody who has any authority over IT staff will understand that there is a complex database behind the app that is used for "clerical type work". If they didn't, then the company wouldn't have IT staff.
Maybe your problem is that a lot of those complex databases have moved to cloud platforms. As an example, many enterprises aren't running their own Exchange servers anymore; Office 365 provides everything they needed to begin with, plus a liability contract that's way better for them when shit goes south than having the ability to go to IT and yell at people.
Naturally, though, this means that the number of enterprises with real IT is absolutely shrinking. Microsoft and Google, and to a lesser extent Amazon, have realistically swallowed all of those on-prem IT needs. The growth in computers is in companies that are delivering custom software to customers, not in companies that just need functional software for their own employees.
I seriously doubt you use much structured programming in your day-to-day life if you're not delivering software to customers. But yeah, you'll be doing less group policy management these days. But for the kind of guy that does group policy management all day, the growth potential has always been in ass kissing.
I can see you're upset, SomeGuy, but there's no reason to hurt innocent bystanders here. Unless what you really mean to insinuate is that gay people are primarily responsible for the billion dollar industry that is rapidly changing the world. Which maybe you are, if you hate change as much as you seem to hate gay people. Personally, I'd be proud to take credit for basically making the PADD from Star Trek happen.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2020, @09:59PM (1 child)
In the orgs I have worked in IT is going nowhere.
In smaller orgs what you talk about oh yeah big time. But most of that was one off onetime guys anyway and anywhere from heroic to moronic. But the large orgs. IT is going nowhere. It is here to stay for a very long time. You only rent if you like burning money. Large orgs figured that years ago when then drop kicked IBM out of their datacenters and replaced them with cheap servers. IBM got back in by selling (you guessed it) cheap servers. I saw a story on hackernews yesterday. Some dude did one small click in a AWS and it cost 80k. That same mistake on hardware you own? 0.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Tuesday March 31 2020, @04:39PM
You don't use AWS to save money. Or you shouldn't. That's stupid, and hey, nobody ever accused procurement managers of being smart.
You use AWS because it is geographically diverse and it provides a superior product to snowflake on-prem servers.
If you're as big as Facebook, you can build your own data centers. You'll still want to run some kind of cloud infrastructure management on them, though. Something like OpenStack. Gone are the days when it's a good idea to ask Bob in IT to set up a new server with the standard runtimes and sidecars. Now you use API calls to provision more VMs for your Kubernetes cluster as needed (and release them when not needed), and instead of keeping the infrastructure topology in Bob's head you keep it in authoritative statefiles that you can use more API calls to get definitive answers about.
And when you need to plan that big expansion into Europe, gone are the days of sending code over there and making modifications to the infrastructure plan to accomodate the different loadout. The application is made to scale in a multi-agent platform. Just scale it down to fit the capabilities, and use the same cloud infrastructure management tools to provision a smaller carbon copy. Then use those same tools to manage routing to take advantage of the geographic diversity.
AWS will let you rent their infrastructure that already does all that. And they'll try to sell you their proprietary managed systems like DynamoDB, Kinesis, and Lambda. Don't do it. Build your stuff to fit in Docker containers and put them in AWS (or GCP, or Azure...or all of the above) as long as the rent is cheaper than the overhead of managing your own data centers. Then when you get big enough that your overhead would be cheaper than Amazon's inflated rent, build your own data centers and deploy the same Docker containers there.
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But all of that is about software development and customer-facing services. Unless your business model relies on gatekeeping some amazing in-house software, anything your employees use in their day-to-day (like emails, scheduling, and word processing) would actually be cheaper on somebody else's platform.
I was going to include inventory management, but those are probably all in-house developed anyway; I'm talking about things already provided by vendors where you go from deploying their software on your servers to just using their servers. Personal use notwithstanding.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?