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The World Wide Computer, Monopolies and Control
Posted by
Soulskill
on Thu Jan 17, 2008 08:23 PM
from the i-cant-do-that-dave dept.
from the i-cant-do-that-dave dept.
Ian Lamont writes "Nick Carr has generated a lot of discussion following his recent comments about the IT department fading away, but there are several other points he is trying to make about the rise of utility computing. He believes that the Web has evolved into a massive, programmable computer (the "World Wide Computer") that essentially lets any person or organization customize it to meet their needs. This relates to another trend he sees — a shift toward centralization. Carr draws interesting parallels to the rise of electricity suppliers during the Industrial Revolution. He says in a book excerpt printed on his blog that while decentralized technologies — the PC, Internet, etc. — can empower individuals, institutions have proven to be quite skilled at reestablishing control. 'Even though the Internet still has no center, technically speaking, control can now be wielded, through software code, from anywhere. What's different, in comparison to the physical world, is that acts of control become harder to detect and those wielding control more difficult to discern.'"
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IT: Is the IT Department Dead? 417 comments
alphadogg writes "The IT department is dead, and it is a shift to utility computing that will kill this corporate career path. So predicts Nicholas Carr in his new book launched Monday, "The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google." Carr is best known for a provocative Harvard Business Review article entitled "Does IT Matter?" Published in 2003, the article asserted that IT investments didn't provide companies with strategic advantages because when one company adopted a new technology, its competitors did the same."
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big server farms, thin clients at home (Score:5, Insightful)
No need for anti piracy features, you don't get to see the executables or source anyways, all tucked away from your prying eyes.
--
Bookmark me [primadd.net]
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and using things like GoogleApps..and the plethora of all the other 'Web 2.0' software out there?
wait...that already happens...
there is very little that you can NOT do via 'the web' without owning any software yourself...
and I'm not talking about using OSS on your personal computer at all.
Re:big server farms, thin clients at home (Score:5, Interesting)
The web, as it currently exists, is a really shitty software platform. Web 2.0, if it meaningfully exists at all, is built on some rather horrible hacks that break down the server-client wall, and for certain kinds of limited applications that's fine, but building substantial applications, like accounting and financial software, in AJAX would be an unbelievably difficult job, and a rather hard one to justify.
I think this guy is, as with his last great proclamation, overstating his case. Yes, in certain arenas, like home and small business email, apps like GMail certainly can play a role, but I can tell you right now that the business I am in, which deals with confidential information, will be waiting a long time before farming out this sort of thing.
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Privacy Laws (Score:5, Insightful)
Just to drive home your point further what can be even more important is that, as trustworthy as Google may be, they are subject to US law. This is a huge problem in places like Canada which have privacy laws since using, for example, GMail means that your organization can end up breaking Canadian law because the US government has free access to any data in your email which you may be legally responsible for protecting.
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I won't deny horrible hacks, but "server-client wall"?
I don't see how it would be either particularly difficult (there are plenty of good libraries out there now) or particularly hard to justify (Business Guy can now print his report
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In ten to fifteen years, the guy may have a point, but at the moment, as I said in another post, the web is a terrible application platform. Quite frankly, I think the model for distributed apps was paved a couple of decades ago by X Windows. The X protocol is horrible and insecure, of course, but
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Carr is talks from the perspective of a user - not a technologist so when I see an article by someone qualified to make such predictions I'll pay more attention. He talks about distributed applications like google apps which have their place for casual users who realise they can get in trouble for copying proprietary software. I don't
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Re:big server farms, thin clients at home (Score:4, Funny)
It will be the 1970s all over again (except without disco).
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Re:big server farms, thin clients at home (Score:5, Insightful)
Look around. There are no thin clients. The iphone is 100x more powerful than my first computer. The macbook air is 1000x more powerful than my first computer.
Imagine 21 years from now. Imagine computers 128x more powerful than they are today. That means that the iphone of 21 years from now will be 10x more powerful than "the lightest laptop available today."
You're talking about "thin clients". But a really powerful computer will be the size of a thick piece of paper.
Yeah, I'm dreaming - but how else do you expect to keep up!? In my professional career (say 18 years), computers have become 100x more powerful, and fit in an envelope.
The only reason for "thin clients" is because the client wants and agrees to be thin.
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Re:big server farms, thin clients at home (Score:5, Insightful)
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I know I know.... (Score:2)
World Wide Computer (Score:5, Funny)
world wide computer, eh? (Score:4, Funny)
20 fix domestic problems
30 printf "Woo!"
40 goto 10
hmm, doesn't seem to be working. hairbrained theory, anyway.
it would probably take 80kb to do that in visual C.
any-to-any internet vs. one-to-everyone control (Score:2)
That said, the past was dominated by one-to-many mechanisms for influence.
affect on the backbone (Score:3)
Re:affect on the backbone (Score:4, Insightful)
Oddly enough that currently defines the difference between the professional level operating systems (some of which are free) and a hobby system that was pushed into the workplace (which you have to pay for). The wide range of malware is currently a single platform problem and is almost all the fault of poor design of two applications - Internet Explorer and Outlook.
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Re:affect on the backbone (Score:5, Insightful)
A.k.a social engineering.
I don't remember encountering any malware since at least before 2000 that could spread itself without relying on the user to infect their own machine. I've had several pieces of malware try to email or even msn file transfer themself to me from an infected pc though.
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All Control-G's are now Taco Bell (Score:4, Insightful)
Or from nowhere. The risk of a bad guy taking over is serious, but the risk that no one is at the helm is much more likely to lead us to death by Global Warming, for example.
You have to look no further than the US Congress to see a worked example. If you idealize every single member of Congress as intelligent, and I think a similar analogy can be made for people on the net or for companies on the net (where you still have to question intelligence sometimes, but let's not and say we did), it's pretty clear that the problem isn't just the sinister taking hold of someone with total power. It's also that it's easy to cause behavior that no one can take responsibility for, and that isn't in the best interest of individuals. The Internet is no different, but not because we didn't have examples of this before. Just because we didn't heed them.
To paraphrase Charlie Stross (Score:5, Interesting)
Ahem.... (Score:5, Insightful)
This guy obviously has no sense of history....real or fictional.
Half-joking. Half. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Half-joking. Half. (Score:4, Funny)
It's where baby Leia is growing up. Even I know that, and I've only seen the first three films!
Why, is something bad going to happen in episode IV?
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The IT cycle? (Score:5, Insightful)
Can't Stop the Signal (Score:2)
Mr. Universe
Frederic Brown's "Answer" (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.alteich.com/oldsite/answer.htm [alteich.com]
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--Voltaire
Seems like they're missing the point.. (Score:3, Insightful)
perhaps it's that they assume the user and authority groups are mutually exclusive.. or perhaps it's the 'programming as control' inference that collapses the argument.. i'm not sure, but i really don't see this outcome occurring.
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Sure you can outsource the generic business stuff, but there are some things that you won't find a host for, some things that are clearly cheaper and better to keep in house, and some things you'd have to be insane to outsource..
The mainframe is back (Score:5, Interesting)
Old is new again.
Ridiculous comparison (Score:5, Insightful)
I for one (Score:2, Funny)
So just start a ... (Score:2, Informative)
So just start a solar/wind/hydro/? powered wireless world wide net.
The Peoples Net
Using off the shelf hardware (solar), it would be a one time cost of (US) $500.00 - $1000.00 to set up self powered node.
I'm shooting from the hip on the costs here, but I used to install solar/hydro, so I'm prolly close.
And the deep cycle batteries would have to be replaced after 5 - 8 years (with good maintenance, if wet cells).
But that would be a truly non centralized network.
Amateur Packet Radio works in a similar wa
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I agree, to a point. (Score:4, Insightful)
Examples would be hosted email, contact management, and calendaring. A central provider can just simply do a better job at providing all these things that an IT department does, and the requirements are all extremely generic. Users seem to want infinite amounts of email storage, and the ability to find an email at a moments notice. That's difficult to manage unless you want to dedicate someone to JUST knowing the email systems.
The thing I disagree with is that the IT department is going away. Simply not true. The difference with other utilities is that the IT department doesn't provide a single, simple resource like electricity. IT provides automation and tools that increase productivity, many of which are going to be way to specialized to centralize.
IT departments may evolve, like they've been evolving for the last 50 years. I've heard many years ago (before my time at least) there were people dedicated just to swap tapes around. We don't have that anymore of course.
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Of course they'll evolve, but the idea that the entire field will shrink to a tiny fraction of its current size is ludicrous. This idea that hardware and software in the future will somehow just magically work, and that what little is left will be handled by little IT elfs that come in the
Uh, yeah. (Score:3, Funny)
So, the real question is...
Where the fuck is my flying car?
Nick Carr is a Horse's Rear, But He's Also Right (Score:3, Insightful)
For businesses, especially small ones, utility computing makes a lot of sense. I work for a 70-person company, and six of our employees (including me) are dedicated to the IT function. We could probably reduce that number in half and still get more revenue-generating projects tackled if we were able to outsource things like backup and recovery, user account maintenance (why isn't this an HR function has always befuddled me - they control the hire/fire function, but don't determine system access at most companies, including mine), software rollouts, machine cloning, etc. I've been evaluating Google apps, and I tell you, it's almost to the point where I can see myself making the business case to deploy it company wide. I close my eyes, imagine a world where i never have to think about email servers and spam blocking again, and I cry a little. Saving my company $150K+/year in the process is just a bonus.
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This is not Nicholas Carr's First Attack on IT (Score:5, Informative)
Carr's current article's argument that IT functions should be taken over by functional units only perpetuates the silo thinking of most organizations. Budgeting IT resources on a departmental basis perpetuates islands of automation, redundant/conflicting rules, ridiculous internal interfaces., etc. Outsourcing some or all IT functions may be reasonable in some cases, but turning control of IT over to the various functional units in an organization is insane.
Re:This is not Nicholas Carr's First Attack on IT (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately the suggested solution, of splitting IT into the surrounding departments, is going to look like a good idea to many director level people. It will (in their minds) ensure immediate service for new equipment, allow a higher level of control over the purchase of items they think are unrelated, and allow them to have changes made to software at a higher level of priority. To the outside manager or director, they generally only see what we are not supplying, not what we are. If we are good at our jobs, but have poor systems, they don't generally realize just how bad things are because we are keeping the system limping along. A lot of our expenditures are due to reasons they just don't understand. If we buy a 48 port managed switch with fibre but were rolled under one of these departments, it could very easily turn into a refurbed 48 port hub off ebay, since they both have lots of connections and thats all you really need.
What about change control? They don't see it. Time for testing? That will get reduced further. Developing in test environments? But those are good machines, they should be used for something important. Oh, and why do you need fancy development tools? Joe down the way made an application to do that in 45 minutes using MS Access, but it takes days in this fancy technology, we'll just use MS Access instead.
The whole idea of splitting IT up into several departments is like a startup company (non-tech) in reverse. Money will go to IT-related resources last, it will be in no one's interest to spend the time, resources, or money to ensure there is a strong infrastructure capable of growth, in house software development will be on-the-fly and likely based on technologies like MS Access. On top of that, larger initiatives like data warehousing, global data management will be left to whoever wants to pay for the whiz-bang consultant to come in and do it their way. Backups, email, directory services, all of this will end up on someone's plate who will forever be trying to drop it off on someone else.
I realize that the author of that article was likely thinking that IT resources would not need to deal with most of these things in the future, and for that I can assume he has not worked in an IT environment in quite a while. While technologies are available to streamline our jobs and allow us to grow the department(s) more slowly that in the past, splitting the department so that no one has these responsibilities is going to have one positive thing going for it: The consultants that come in to clean up the mess after the takeover are going to be set for a good long time.
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Net protocols are political - choose a side (Score:3, Interesting)
encrypted redundant moving storage virtual layer on top of lower-level net
protocols, could retain freedom from monopoly control of information
and services.
But watch for the predictable attempts to get legislation against such
"nebulous dark-matter middle-nets". Watch for fear arguments to be used
as justification. Watch for increasingly asymmetric ISP plans (download good,
upload bad), and protocol-based throttling or filtering, by the pipe providers.
These are all the very predictable reactions by "the man". They must it goes
without saying be resisted, in law and political discourse, and economic boycott,
or circumvented by all ingenious tricky means necessary.
P.S. I've been predicting this inversion of the intranet to where it is the "extranet",
and inversion of where we would trust our data (What, you kept your data on
your own servers, and not the massively redundant global storage net?
Are you insane??) for a long time now, but nobody listens to me.
(Brain the size of a planet, and they've got me parking cars...)
Re:yea (Score:5, Funny)
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