My new column is below, so don’t forget to read it, but now for something completely different…
I’m running two virtual panels this week as part of Anina.net’s Digital Online Fashion Summit. Anina’s the pretty girl next to me on the top of this page. She lives in Beijing and this will be a global event.
Digital Fashion Online Summit
March 28th – 29th, 2020
A two-day online event for fashion brands, marketing managers, product directors, and online strategists. Speeches are starting at 10 AM and running all day every hour. Join us online at http://digitalfashion.360fashion.net
Learn from top fashion and technology experts which technologies to invest in to bring your brand online and in the lead. With the year starting off with COVID-19, many events have been canceled, with people traveling less, and turning to online for entertainment, shopping, and connection.
How can brands stay in front of their eyes and create a meaningful connection? Using 3D e-commerce, Fit Technologies, Live Streaming, and Artificial intelligence to predict connect, and create a sustainable future! Now is the moment to tech-up to make it to the end of the year!
Now, back to our regular programming…
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.
But wait, who will replace my keyboard?
Amazon has been replacing all of our keyboards for some time now, along with our mice and our failed cables, and even entire PCs.
IT has been changing steadily from kids taking elevators up from the sub-basement to Amazon Prime trucks rolling-up to your mailbox.
At the same time, our network providers have been working to limit their truck rolls entirely. Stop by the Comcast storefront to get your cable modem, because nobody is going to come to install it if you aren’t the first person living there to have cable.
Two technical trends are at work here, one having to do with hardware and the other having to do with networking. Both are driven mainly by economics.
Networking is in the lead here, because the hardware transition can’t happen unless the network enables it. The network transition I’m talking about is MPLS to SD-WAN to SASE. I’ll now explain what these acronyms mean, but if you only care about investing the punchline to this whole column is INVEST IN SASE, which right now primarily means Cato Networks and Fortinet and probably a bunch of startups.
In the beginning, there was Bob Metcalfe and Ethernet and God saw that both were good, but Ethernet was a protocol for Local Area Networks (LANs) that didn’t work nearly as well when business was extended beyond the building. In those days pulling the boss’s home office into the LAN required a fractional T-1 line that cost maybe $600 per month — too much for anyone but Mr. Bigshot.
Then came Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), a protocol for efficient network traffic flow between two or more locations. The idea behind MPLS was to encapsulate data packets so they could be extended beyond the LAN over almost any network technology, even home DSL links from the phone company.
MPLS required a new, more expensive router, so of course, Cisco and Juniper loved it. And MPLS worked a treat, but its bandwidth costs were high. Ironically, it’s not DSL or Cable bandwidth we’re talking about but corporate bandwidth, because it was at the corporate router where the computationally expensive encapsulation and de-encapsulation were taking place. So while MPLS was way cheaper than buying multiple T-1s, it was still expensive.
Now this story takes on a social, or maybe cultural, theme, which is consumer demand for increased bandwidth. Corporate networks were built for corporate applications, which is to say e-mail, file transfer, and, eventually, Voice-over IP (VoIP) phones — all low-bandwidth applications. Consumer networks, in contrast, were built for pornography — a high-bandwidth application.
Oh, and for Netflix, too.
Because the applications consumers used on their home networks were so much better than those on their corporate networks, users began to complain, asking for more and more bandwidth so they could teleconference and use social media. And because more bandwidth brought a bigger budget and more corporate-political power to the MIS-cum-IT department, the guys in white shirts were happy to help.
Ironically, it ultimately meant helping themselves out of their jobs.
The demand for higher bandwidth from MPLS begat SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Networking).
If you read online about these topics (MPLS and SD-WAN) most of what you’ll find is marketing information intended to push buyers in one direction or another. What I am writing here is from a somewhat higher-level (and cheekier) perspective, so if it doesn’t exactly agree with the brochure you’ve been reading that doesn’t necessarily mean I am wrong, Mister Smartypants.
MPLS is router-to-router while SD-WAN is effectively node-to-node. It’s networking software running as close to the user as possible, though some vendors put it in an appliance rather than on your PC or phone because they can get your company to pay more money that way. Nobody these days uses all the processor cores in their device, so SD-WAN can operate there just as well as in an appliance, maybe better.
But even SD-WAN is just so, well, 2019. The new technology for 2020 is SASE — Secure Access Service Edge — which takes all the functionality of MPLS and SD-WAN and crunches it into a firewall, running everything in the cloud. So with SASE there is no appliance. There can be no appliance.
For that matter, with SASE (pronounced “sassy,” by the way) there doesn’t even have to be a PC.
SASE extends both the network and a security model end-to-end over any network including 4G or 5G wireless. Some folks will run their applications in their end device, whether it is a PC, phone, tablet, whatever, and some will run their applications in the same cloud as SASE, in which case everything will be that much faster and more secure.
That’s end end-game if there is one — everything in the cloud with your device strictly for input and output, painting screens compressed with HTML5.
It’s the end of IT because your device will no longer contain anything so it can be simply replaced via Amazon if it is damaged or lost, with the IT kid in the white shirt becoming an Uber driver.
Since COVID-19 is trapping us in our homes it is forcing this transition to happen faster than it might have. But it was always going to happen.
And the follow-on implication is that anything we might have done at work short of getting a cup of coffee, contracting a communicable disease, or having an office affair, we’ll forever-more be able to do just as well from home.
I wonder what that portends for commercial real estate?
It’s certainly going to be easier for people to ask their managers if they can work from home. We’ll probably see more people doing that than ever before. It’s also interesting watching people who were previously uninterested in tech get things like Zoom installed on their phones and tablets so they can have virtual social meetups. We’re all in IT now, in a sense.
.
As for IT workers, there will always be a need for specialized people who know more about how tech works and can support people working from home. But it’s probably not going to be a boom industry.
Jeremy,
I think he’s saying you won’t even have to ask to work at home. The manager doesn’t want to pay for your floor space or desk. Up until now, he had to pay for them a) in order to protect his budget, and b) because his stodgy managers expected him to. C19 exposed both those lies.
Gee, I still think of “self-addressed stamped envelopes” when I hear SASE… dating myself, I guess!
Dating yourself is still illegal in 27 states.
IT is dead! Long live IT!. No, they won’t be handing out keyboards, mice, etc, but they will be supporting networks, cloud instances, VPN-access, etc. Our IT dept just transitioned our entire company (3000+ employees) to 100% work-from-home in less than 2 weeks. I’m glad our IT dept was there, and I don’t think they’re going away anytime soon.
This is the Cringely I started reading in InfoWorld all those decades ago, and it’s the Cringely we all need now. Even in his dotage, he has gifts for us. 🙂
I agree… welcome back Cringley! I learned something new and useful in both your most recent posts. I don’t know what changed recently but give us more of the same insightful editorial please.
No, he’s one of the people who used that name a long time ago.
This article proves that he was only ever an office worker than didn’t know what IT actually did then, and for sure doesn’t know what they do now.
Yes, he was one of the InfoWorld authors, but “During Stephens’ lengthy tenure (1987–1995), the character of Cringely changed dramatically”. Note the word “lengthy” and that he reached a settlement with InfoWorld to continue using that pen name as long as it’s not for a competing publication.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_X._Cringely
I’m a chemist. I finally figured out how to get something to work that I’ve been working on for over a year. At the last step I set it up and, before I could come back, we were shut down. I can’t do the important stuff at home. I need a hood so that the vapors don’t kill me. Also, if I did it at home my wife would kill me. But I’m old (born in ’53) so maybe I don’t matter.
I don’t think Robert is saying labs and group works aren’t needed anymore. He’s saying we will get together in labs and elsewhere *as needed*, rather than as a common business practice. Most of the face-to-face meetings are a farce, and C19 will prove it. If you can justify a lab with a hood, you will get it.
Somebody still needs to be around to help you log into the corporate network.
“Alexa, can you log into the log into the corporate network for me”
“I can’t do that Dave…”
I’m a software engineer that currently specializes in building IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems in the cloud for large corporate call centers. My current project includes designing an IVR system to dispense information useful to those having login issues.
Sorry HAL, you’re too late.
RE: “dispense information useful to those having login issues” should be changed to “dispense information, which my company thinks should be useful to those having login issues”
There will be a website for that.
“It’s the end of IT because your device will no longer contain anything so it can be simply replaced via Amazon if it is damaged or lost, with the IT kid in the white shirt becoming an Uber driver.”
How much did ridesharingdriver.com pay for this backlink?
“How much did ridesharingdriver.com pay for this backlink?”
And now we know why Crookely bothered to fix the reply function of the comments. He’s trying to monetize this site.
That also explains why my Mineserver comment seems to have disappeared. Can’t have the paying customers see anything but sweetness and light, eh?
In fairness though this “technology” blog is such a disaster that posts will disappear for any reason whatsoever.
That’s strange. In many decades of reading Cringely’s website, I don’t recall comments being taken down after they were successfully posted. Often the spam filters automatically prevent a post for odd, nonobvious reasons. Are you sure it successfully posted in the first place?
“I wonder what that portends for commercial real estate?”
What about this one?
Hope you cashed the check for those backlinks before it bounces.
This whole article is recycling old ideas: plug and play, and client-server models. The only big difference I can see is things becoming caught up in the shrink-wrapped and consumerised and rent seeking model. It’s more about shifts of power and marketing and who makes the money than anything else. Doubtless the 1%’ers, the new royalty, and behind it all. Call me a cynic.
Secure remote connectivity to the corporate network is a headache and always will be.
First, you absolutely need to initiate something like RSA SecurID to keep hackers from cracking userids and passwords and to keep everything encrypted.
Then, you have to supply corporate applications to remote locations – and, there may be hundreds or even thousands of them.
There is basically 2 approaches to do that.
1. Provide completely locked-down notebook PCs that employees can take to remote locations
or
2. Provide some type of remote web-based PC desktop.
Obviously all communication in either scenario needs to be encrypted inside the remote application and decrypted after it is inside the corporate firewall.
In either scenario I could care less what infrastructure is used to transport the remote PC communication to and from the internet
.
SQRL
That makes two of us. I wonder how long it’ll take until one popular website includes an optional SQRL login.
SQRL? That’s nuts.
“AI will end all IT. Automation will do all the work.” Groundhog day for the past 10 years.
Dream on
Amazon has vending machines stocked with commonly needed IT supplies…including keyboards. Swipe your card, select your part, and take away.
@True Rock
The whole stack is compromised from the ground up. The mistakes of Intel and Microsoft are well known but they aren’t the only offenders. Pretty much all modern platforms are broken from a security point of view and need a fundamental rethink. There is promising work coming out of Cambridge (or Oxford or both, I forget) on new hardware and OS architectures but the established monopolies (mostly US due to insulartity and scale and anti-competitive protectionist monopoly legislation) are not interested in revolutionary change. Likewise, the Transputer languished until patents expired and CPU bus architecture could be pilfered. ARM was the one which got away.
.
RSA is another press of the dopamine producing gerbil peddle.
.
Better social and cultural models are in themselves a form of security and also keep power in check. This is lacking in this whole discussion.
Transputer? Now there’s a name I haven’t heard of in a few decades. Too slow and too expensive.
I was going to say, jokingly, it’s a transistor computer. Then I looked it up “The transputer (the name deriving from “transistor” and “computer”[5])”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer
I too remember when the Transputer was gonna be the cool thing.
The transputer sounds like some new “woke” version of the computer that identifies as something else.
Multiprocessing turned out to be one of those problems that was way harder than it looked at first glance.
Otherwise, we’d have CPU boards to a couple hundred 50-cent ARM processors in high-end machines…
It *was* a cool thing. I had 128 cpu Transputing Surface in my office for a while. Coolest computer box ever.
The reason it failed was mostly the accident of intel getting vast amounts of money tossed at them as a result of the PC compatible explosion and all the effort going to faster single cpu systems. This suited the tragically lazy software world since it involved no nasty having to think about parallelism.
Instead of IT I would say networking. IT isn’t just hardware and you’re mostly talking about hardware/network. IT will always exist. Connectivity issues, programming, support. How many times does Windows crash leaving the user in need for support? You still need to control who can access your corporate network. It doesn’t happen all by itself. And i don’t think management will allow people to work from home all the time. I hope this crisis will broaden their minds towards working from home and they see the advantages, but not a lot will change from this I think.
As long as Windows exists there will be a need for IT of some description. The IT I started in, er 1978, bears no resemblance to the IT of 2020 nor where we will be in 2030. Decreasing on premise personnel and fewer ‘cloud’ personnel. It will not be a growth area.
If you really want to get a feel for what a world where everyone works from home would look like, read ORA:CLE by Kevin O’Donnel from 1984. (Although in that case, the pandemic is of a somewhat different nature: bat-like aliens are roaming the skies. But that’s not the main point of the story.)
Wow you’re out of touch. By IT you mean Helpdesk? Sure there could be some reduction there. Who keeps your office 365, exchange, active directory, file share, Citrix, vpn service and everything else running ? What a crap article
IT won’t go anywhere as long as your company is still using computers. Something can work on cloud, not everything. There are services must be in house. so IT stays. BTW, cloud is just outsourcing some of your services to other peoples server. they are still all the the same on the background.
Back when timesharing was a thing, IT was a few people who knew how to use the applications that were rented with the system, and how to write a few programs to tie things together or do special things that the standard stuff didn’t. The place I worked in the early 1980s had *ta da* me as the IT department: design, coding, documenting, training, supporting. And it worked, because the universe of software was pretty limited. Now we have cloud stuff – doing our word processing online with a terminal, just like we did in the 1980s with Officevision on VM. I think I agree with Cringely that cloud-based stuff will kill off IT as we knew it since PCs became networked business machines and demanded all that infrastructure. I don’t agree with it will die as a corporate or business function, but it’ll change to be more user-oriented.
Oh please give me a break.
If you’re talking about tier-1 Helpdesk who only know how to hand out a keyboard or reboot a machine, sure.
But as other people have said. Who do you think will keep your office 365, exchange, active directory, file share, Citrix, vpn service and everything else running ? Who do you think will will be able to write PowerShell and Python scripts to optimize and maintain IT infrastructure within a business?
Regardless of the higher level stuff, as long as there’s going to be stupid end users, even IT Helpdesk is going to be around for a long time. Somebody needs to put out the fires idiots like you keep creating.
Interesting, but I think the big problem has for a long time not been networking and protocols, etc. No, the problem is Managers have to see butts in the seat. Starting Monday I have been working from home. I test the software by HAND, I know, I know no one does that anymore! Well, my company does. I thought I would be the mechanism for making that transition to automated testing, WRONG. What is amazing is they are obviously from the online meetings we have had very nervous that all those people working from home might actually do something else like mop the kitchen floor? But that is again more a cultural problem instead of something real. All work with a computer tends to have a LOT of downtimes, sort of the nature of the beast. Programmers have meetings about how to do something, and that drags on and turns into the latest game they both are playing? Me because they didn’t take advantage of my skillset and turned me into a one-trick pony when there are no tests their really is no work to do. I keep myself busy but have to watch it, for fear an other rmanager will see me doing something not testing? The reason for that long diatribe. Unless there is just an overwhelming decrease in costs, I just can’t see widespread work from home after this. Managers demand butts in the seats.
The IT kid in the white shirt is going to become an Amazon delivery person.
THERE IS NO CLOUD.
It’s just someone else’s computer.
THERE IS NO COMPUTER.
It’s just someone else’s cloud.
Who’s going to handle all of the password resets? When users don’t even bother to remember their passwords anymore there will always be a need for IT. 😉
Already contracting with help desk companies that specialize in this work, add value, save costs, and have fluency in more than one language.
It’ll all be down with 2-factor authentication using phones.
“IT” is not, simply or primarily, the deployment and maintenance of desktop or mobile computing environments. IT is mostly (by headcount and cost) the development and maintenance of custom[ized] server-side applications. The motivations to do this are not going to change in 2020. Neither are the motivations to do it wrong, which means it has constantly to be done over again, etc.
The working remotely genie is out of the bottle like never before and barring the need for even more robust solutions to provide professionals with data security they are comfortable with, some cubes may remain forever empty. So I predict the data security business is about to get bigger then ever before.
A couple of weeks ago, when it became apparent that many people would need to work from home, one of the network administrators at my company installed a VPN solution on a server which allows people to connect to the corporate network from anywhere in the world. The entire process took about 2 hours. The data is encrypted using current state-of-the-art practices. The system does not need any maintenance. The fact that people suddenly start working from home does not open up a huge, untapped market, because VPN solutions like this which enable telecommuting have been available off the shelf for years.
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] IL approche de la décédé, s’estompant de jour en jour. Mais ne blâmez pas COVID-19 car la décédé de l’informatique était inévitable. Ce nouveau coronavirus a rendu les choses un peu plus rapides […]
How this blog article made Slashdot I don’t know. The entire article is rehashed and reheated old stuff like new paint on an old fence. The fundamentals haven’t changed one iota. It’s just shifting around who gets the money and who does the work and introduces a whole new set of problems to peddle more products and services behind the smokescreen.
.
The last time I checked Sugarbabes didn’t put me out work. Same thing.
The comments on Slashdot are… not kind.
Death? Nope. Big change, you bet! Some IT will change slowly (I work in one of these), some will be nimble. The people who actually sign checks will keep the nimble IT departments while seriously downsizing the slow ones by going directly to the suppliers (AWS, GCP, Azure etc). Instead of keyboards, a nimble IT department can help with usage of these services rather than be replaced by them.
I’m an end user, and when my company was purchased and folded into the new company I promise you IT was there. Most of us work from home, so there was no one physically on site, but I had to call more than one time to get my laptop software configured to access the new VPN. I actually did my IT guys a favor by reinstalling windows 10 on the laptop that came with me from the old company because the old company did not give our guys access to be able to get the laptops that came over with the purchase added to the new company domain.
No, IT is not coming to replace my keyboard. They are handling all of the networking and administravia needed to keep our company running though.
SO much arrogance in these comments, which appears to be a standard Cringely comment affliction. No wonder so many hate IT people.
[…] lots of pins.) Robert X. Cringely, who is apparently not the only Cringely, has a prediction that 2020 Brings the Death of IT in his I, Cringely site. He predicts that all of us working at home in isolation is going to […]
I’m guessing it’s because I’m an escort posting on here and mentioned Sugarbabes yesterday but Slashdot just ran a topic on Ashley Madison booming during the coronavirus outbreak. From the topic “Some are just looking to chat with someone other than a spouse, some are seeking emotional validation or the fantasy of pursuing a secret sex life…” Yes, basically this. Freeloaders and usually married…
.
Part of escort involves verifying clients. One of those tasks is filtering out the tyre kickers and freeloaders. Sure, I’d have loads of guys pumping me or yapping away in chat for free if I let them. Sadly anything other than general public chat and you can get your cash out. I don’t work for free nor do I allow a middleman to profit off my time for free. I can and have attracted clients via online services but if you have to ask where you’re likely not the target market.
I don’t get it. It’s a glorified BYOD article ??
We still need some sort of computing device to function – professionally and personally.
Those devices do need some support. Whether it’s the cable or battery or the OS upgrade, security patches, device upgrades. And IT folks still needed in a corporation to manage these. That day of BYOD has been in the making for last few years but in places like mine SEC – our disks are encrypted And devices are secured in many different ways and don’t forget VPN tokens. No one can replace our IT for now. Granted its a small percentage, but for sure IT ain’t going away.
What Cringely is doing is selling a business model. He’s completely ignoring the tech issues like OS which support one-to-many in any direction you want out of he box. Microsoft are selling these options to big business but strangling small business and the single consumer level user so they can both keep big business on boardand also monitize their OS platform by selling infrastructure and “value added” services (hah hah) not upgraded OS features. He’s also ignoring funamental security issues which are relevant to both OS design and networks and BYOD etc. It is all simply about taking money off you and giving it to them and manufacturing consent and an ecosystem to crush competition and anything different. Same old Microsoft.
.
There is a reason why any smart escort is either an independent or runs their own franchise (for want of a less blatant description) or collaborates with other escorts and that is very simply to maintain self-ownership.I don’t have a boss telling me what to do or lowering standards or taking a rake of the top.
I’m sure going to miss those office affairs…
Bob, this is the biggest load of horseshit I have read for a while.
IT has not just devices and networks, there’s governance, policy, security, and a whole more. The only reason that all of these things work well together is because of IT. IT has expanded exponentially from the MIS days.
Also, keep in mind “the cloud” is not our saviour you seem to make it out to be; it’s not trustworthy enough – it’s pretty good, but not 100% there yet. By “trustworthy” I mean several things: security, privacy, and protection from third-party and/or meddling by government and legislative agencies.
There is still a need for personal devices with reasonable compute capability.
“Replacing a keyboard” is not IT, that is a procurement exercise – don’t dumb down IT as a profession to make what is fundmentally a straw-man argument.
Snarfy,
Well said! The only thing I’d add is history, meaning how do you get from the crap you have running today to the nirvana promised by the vendors and carriers? Today we have a nice word for it called “migration” and the wholesale forklift replacement advocated by cultists and “forward looking savants” like Bob doesn’t usually ever cut it. Why I still have a mainframe running a critical business application written in IBM 1401 Autocoder which no CEO in the last 50 years has had the testicular fortitude to try to replace. Call it “No Guts to Gut” syndrome. LOL
How many lines of COBOL still running today? Yes, we’ll get there, but it will be an EVOLUTION, not a REVOLUTION, and a “as little risk as possible” one at that. Maybe new companies or small agile ones, but I’m not sure how many will survive this COVID-19 epidemic depression.
A lot of folks will be laid off this year, much in process can be eliminated and IT is certainly not a growth profession. But don’t worry, not many in IT will be Uber drivers yet, especially those on the advisory side of IT. They may be moved into the business lines, but they won’t be gone soon.
In fairness to most of the commenters, Bob is predicting a future that’s hard to imagine with the current crop of complicated end-user devices, all of which are computers of one sort or another, requiring some sort of IT support. It’s not until the end of the article that Bob explains why his prediction makes sense, namely, extremely simple end-user devices: “That’s end end-game if there is one — everything in the cloud with your device strictly for input and output, painting screens compressed with HTML5. It’s the end of IT because your device will no longer contain anything so it can be simply replaced via Amazon if it is damaged or lost”.
It’s an old idea. See Google’s Chrome OS + Chrome Apps, Google Drive, Google Docs, etc.
Last year Microsoft introduced Microsoft Virtual Desktop, providing shared virtual Windows machines.
But… do you really want all your company’s IT on remote servers belonging to a mega corporation? It doesn’t seem to have caught on with individual users either.
“Computing to the edge” (etc.) has been a hot topic for at least a decade — “Cringley” should have mentioned that.
Way to miss the point of what people are saying. Cringely is massaging known knowns to peddle a cloud-for-everything narrative. Thick client, local or remote, standalone or networked, one-to-one through to many-to-many and all combinations thereof are done to death abstractions. Microsoft and Amazon and all the rest of them could sell the complete infrastructure so the end user gets to choose but they don’t. They a parcel it up into tiers and sell it to state including military, big business, and small business and consumer. A large portion of this conflicts with governance, human rights, and monopoly laws and economics and none of those arguments are going away. I’m not even counting the international angles or new technology in the research labs which makes current OS and hardware security models obsolete or legal or political developments. And you’re saying Amazon don’t have IT? IT doesn’t disappear just because you handed money over for a magic token. I personally think shit which doesn’ t work and forced obsolecence will eventually go away and it may not be Microsoft or Amazon or even America which makes that happen. There’s this thing called Europe and Asia too, you know? Not all of us buy into the hegemony. It’s possible to imagine a different world.You just want to have to listen to it.
Interesting perspective Bob. Ironically, you are predicting IBM got architecture right with a smart terminal and everything else back in datacenter. Judging by comment made by a teacher today about moving work in Google Classroom being easy and kids recommencing school from home, C19 may be lab for trying out next structures of work and learning. Or just another crash and depression. Good read regardless.
Thirty odd years ago, I worked with a gentleman who was trying to move the company from a centralized data processing system to the client-server paradigm.
After wasting several years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, he left the company.
Subsequently, management decided to merge with another company in the same industry. At some point, he was called back to consult. He was now espousing a centralized paradigm because it was easier to manage.
He said, “The originators of data processing had it right.”
The merger did not happen on schedule. Promises were not kept. Millions of dollars changed hands.
Eventually, the merger took place. Management blamed their failure to perform on the attacks of 9/11.
The successor company toddled along for almost 8 years. Who knows what IT paradigm was in place when another company bought their assets?
Don’t ask me; I don’t know!
But the alleged reason for the merger was a superior IT system. I know, that from the ashes, one person decided to never work for a public company again. He took his golden parachute and started a privately held company in the same industry. Funny thing . . . the original merger was between our public company and their private company. The result was a public company. Except that public company no longer exists. Only a private company started by one guy and a few principals from the original company.
And they’ve been doing okay. They still have jobs.
“Good luck with that,” says IT with a smirk.
I can’t be bothered to look it up, but this is just a slightly warmed rehash of a previous cloud router prediction from Cringely. Since then, has the router disappeared? No. Doing your routing in the cloud is some niche activity that doesn’t give you great performance, and could give problems because the streaming services use geolocation on your IP address to decide whether to stream the latest shows to you.
As a thing you need to worry about, this will depend on a new generation of startups. Established businesses with legacy software will keep running legacy software. After all, mainframe programmer is still a job that exists. If the startup is clever, it can stick to cloud-native services and not need the security assurances that an IT department tries to provide. Because legacy companies don’t all die on schedule, then IT departments will continue to be a thing for the indefinite future.
The router still exists, but for most homes and small businesses it’s an invisible component provided by the ISP, its workings a complete mystery that the ISP has no eagerness to teach. The IT department is there. And at the other service providers.
RE: “geolocation on your IP address” Whether the router is in the cloud or local, each endpoint needs an IP address in order to route the normal TCP/IP data or Cringely’s “screen painting” info. The assigned IP can still be used for geolocation purposes, whether wanted or not. So I don’t understand why you brought it up.
[…] week long-time tech pundit Robert Cringely predicted “the death of IT” in 2020 due to the widespread adoption of SD-WAN and […]
[…] week long-time tech pundit Robert Cringely predicted “the death of IT” in 2020 due to the widespread adoption of SD-WAN and […]
SDN which on a very high level is/was the process and technological management of a corporate network taking place centrally by software. That has shifted to the end-user requiring just a connection into the corporate firewall via a secure tunnel. Effectively the corporation has activated a business continuity plan because the normal place of work is no longer available, whether you even had one or not. Because the technology has advanced so much It’s actually a secure efficient model however, we as a society have yet to catch up and assess those associated risks. Perhaps the corporate real estate becomes the hot-standby but on very very smaller scale.
[…] w związku z powyższym prawdopodobnie nastąpi krach na rynku przestrzeni biurowych (niniejszym channelinguję Roberta X. Cringely’ego); że ogólnie ludzie zostali zmuszeni do przekonania się, że zmiany są nie tylko potrzebne ale […]
[…] 2020 Brings the Death of IT […]
Thanks Bob for the ‘always insightful’ messaging. We are in the process of deploying SDWAN right now. The main problem we are having is our provider, does not have control of their vendor relationships. In order to provide redundancy in this SDWAN environment, the vendor needs to have a tighter relationship with the last mile providers. The last mile used to be hidden from us, the end user group. In the past (MPLS), we would call Windstream who would own the relationship to our equipment for voice and data. Now, we call Windstream who tells us it’s a ‘fill in the vendor’ problem. These providers are best with consumers who can sit there for two days or more to get service. So, redundancy (multiple overall providers) are the most important for business continuity and redundancy. What a pain in the butt. If vendors like Windstream do not add value other than invoice consolidation, what’s the point!!!!
Always love reading the content. Let us know if you get back east!!! Would love to have a burger this summer with you and the family!!!
IT is not dying who is going to run the infrastructure. This article doesn’t explain how that is going to be replaced. What a clickbait title.
Is there a continuous improvement in IT services, absolutely! Does this mean IT workers are going away, absolutely not! Companies may very well be able to downsize with SASE, but desktops are not going away, internal networks are not going away, even VOIP is not going away. Years ago they said we would be using our phones as our desktops, and while phones are greatly increased our ability to access from anywhere, business still use desktops and laptops as their primary tool to interact with data. The NEXT thing is just that the next thing. In technology, nothing seems to be cataclysmic anymore, instead, small incremental progressions, which shift resources, but does not eliminate them.