Titans of tech: Why I'll never trust 'em
World is what it is, but I yam what I yam
Posted in Management, 7th September 2012 08:33 GMT
Free whitepaper – Hands on with Hyper-V 3.0 and virtual machine movement
Sysadmin blog I am responsible for making decisions regarding the purchase of computer hardware, software and services. I advise others regarding the tactical and strategic implementations of technologies and IT-related services. The financial security and stability of my own company, the companies of my clients and all the associated employees depends at least in part upon the accuracy and soundness of my decisions. The process underlying my decision-making is the source of continued introspection.
Who do you believe in?
The critical question is: "In whom do you have faith?"
Do you have faith in a deity, in friends or in family? Do you have faith in your government, your educational institution – in teachers, journalists, analysts or corporations? In whom do you place your trust for the financial security and stability of yourself, and all those under your care?
I seem to have a harder time of this than most. Neither I nor my clients have the petty cash available to attend the myriad relevant industry conferences. I don't get invites to super-secret, ultra-NDAed roadmap viewings. I rarely get to sit down with the suits and CxOs of the technology industry over beer. Put simply: there is an inadequate amount of the kinds of frank, honest discussion that leads to a greater understanding of the motivations behind the sometimes incomprehensible decisions of the companies that shape our industry.
I'm working hard to make the connections that get me into these events, get me interviews with the right people and attached to the right junkets at the right times. Writing for The Register opens some doors, but not as many as I'd like [Sadly with many tech companies - naming no names - working for the Register causes doors to close ... but fortunately only the doors of the PR and marketing departments - Ed]. For me, divining the future requires reading the same entrails as the rest of you.
As soon as you move from implementation to decision making, you have a choice: accept the advice of other analysts, or do the leg work of analytics yourself. I opt for both; aggregating information from hundreds of different sources and filtering it all through a complex series of perceptual, rationality and integrity filters in order to differentiate fact from spin.
Transparency: We've heard of it
Reading the entrails is getting tougher. Specialist marketing agencies are springing up all over the place. People with decades of experience in "controlling the message" are training an entire generation of highly educated, highly intelligent PR flaks in defeating our bullshit detectors. Each decade adds more hard science to the marketing toolkit; our practical understanding of human psychology and group dynamics expands every year.
Apple built an empire on spin, secrecy and hype. The less they revealed the more wild and fevered the speculation grew. They achieved brand recognition beyond anyone's wildest dreams by very carefully and assiduously keeping silent, consistently turning a deaf ear to customer feedback and doing next to nothing on the analyst/press relations front. At the end of the day it doesn't have a tangible effect on the landscape because Apple is a consumer electronics company, not an IT company.
The world is a darker place when business-critical players like Microsoft start adopting the same tactics. Microsoft is everywhere: from the hypervisor to the cloud, the thin client to the desktop, the server to the phone. You can't throw a rock in most businesses without hitting something it has a hand in, and anything other than absolute transparency on its behalf is something I have a big problem with.
Microsoft is certainly not alone in its importance: "Oracle doesn't have customers, it has hostages." This saying exists because Oracle is in a position where it is the only company in the world capable of providing critical infrastructure. The truth is made visible in the lucrative industry of "moving customers to Anything But Oracle."
Cisco is another name worth mentioning. What they do is unquestionably important; and yet numerous companies are doing great business on the strength of "We do what Cisco does, but we don't behave like Cisco."
I am not the hive mind
It goes against conventional wisdom to utilise or advocate technology from anyone except well-established industry leaders such as those discussed above. The conservative approach to risk management says that the available cash reserves and huge customer base of these companies mean they are not going anywhere for a very long time. They represent a "safe bet", one that analysts, journalists and systems administrators are often and easily ridiculed for challenging.
Here, I must break from conventional wisdom. I do not take issue with the technologies on offer or the perceived viability of the companies in question. Even when I personally dislike an individual product, the majority of the world will end up adopting it, through sheer corporate inertia if nothing else. The Tech Titans are where they are because they make good gear. Even if they were to fail miserably several times in a row, their sheer largesse ensures they will all be around for decades.
My issues with many of tech's biggest companies lie in visibility. Not being one of those NDAed analysts with long-term road maps and the heart-to-hearts with CxOs, I have to rely on publicly available information. As secrecy becomes the norm, separating fact from spin becomes more difficult.
Millions of dollars are spent to convince me to buy products when what is actually required is a marketing-free, warts-and-all discussion about those products from the people who built them. New features and Ballmer dancing on stage in an ill-fitting suit is cool and all, but what I really need is a discussion about bugs, removed features and the user experience. I need this discussion to occur free from the sensationalism of breaking headlines and the watchful eyes of PR. Instead, I have been repeatedly told to simply "have faith".
It is certainly a risk to buy from Arista instead of Cisco, or Citrix instead of VMware. It is more effort to use Red Hat instead of Microsoft, or to port your applications away from Oracle. That said my clients are SMEs. We cannot afford to get locked in to a vendor's ecosystem, only to have a vTax imposed or be forced onto a significantly higher TCO rental model.
If you're a large enough company, you can afford to adopt the attitude that "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM/Cisco/Microsoft/Oracle/VMware/etc." A goof in IT spend is a small wobble in the share price; it is not an upset that could cost you the entire company. Small businesses, start-ups and SMEs don't have that buffer. An IT cock-up can be the difference between making a slim profit and going broke. In this space there is no room for "faith".
At the risk of becoming a pariah among the more conservative tech press and analyst crowd, I choose to reject faith. I choose caution and scepticism instead; I choose to bite the hand that feeds IT. ®
Free whitepaper – Hands on with Hyper-V 3.0 and virtual machine movement
COMMENTS
Microsoft? Transparent?!
I am not a Microsoft hater. I appreciate much of what they done. I'm typing this on a Win 7 box. I even resisted writing "Micro$oft". But I go back to the DOS days. My standard toolkit still has a copy of a86 and Ralph Brown's interrupt list. So I remember all the Microsoft-only "APIs", and all the anti-competitive malarkey Microsoft engaged in. Yes, they seem to have reformed. But in the same way that Mrs Thatcher made me anti-Tory, Microsoft made me pro-openess and pro-transparency an I haven't entirely forgiven either. So seeing the words "Microsoft" and "transparency" in the same sentence made me choke. A sober spell doesn't stop them being a urunk; I'm sure they're itching to return to type. And when Apple have made it work so successfully, who can blame them?
Now, back to my entrails.
This.
"If you're a large enough company, you can afford to adopt the attitude that "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM/Cisco/Microsoft/Oracle/VMware/etc." A goof in IT spend is a small wobble in the share price; it is not an upset that could cost you the entire company. Small businesses, start-ups and SMEs don't have that buffer. An IT cock-up can be the difference between making a slim profit and going broke. In this space there is no room for "faith"."
This. Exactly.
I wish I could add several "pint" icons as well as a thumbs up...
Re: Business is king.
I still ask that question. It's why I use XP 64-bit Edition and Office 2003 on shiny new hardware.
Does Office 2007/2010 and Windows 7/8 bring me any extra benefits with newer hardware? Or do I get a better deal running Windows XP x64 on new hardware, at speeds the supposedly "faster" Windows 7 has yet to match? I don't need DirectX 10/11 - nor do I need IE9, either: I use Opera. Funnily enough, most of my clients (banks and telecoms) have also been sticking with Windows XP (even the 32-bit version, despite its limitations) - even on new hardware - and this isn't for a lack of Windows 7 licence stickers on the box.
I absolutely love new hardware, and Intel has made sure that the benefits have been pretty good in recent years, with mind-boggling advances in speed, bandwidth improvements and power efficiency. The same cannot be said of Microsoft - does Windows 7 use a miserly 175MB of RAM upon boot-up, leaving the other 15.8GB for me? Does it hell. I have to pay for a shit-load of DRM and "visual experience" features I neither need nor want. Do they help me, or my work? No. 2005 was the high-water line for Microsoft - ever since then, they've been on a decline.
In recent years, quite a few organisations (mostly software - Microsoft isn't alone in their guilt here: Witness the stupidity of Gnome 3 and KDE 4 if you need any further proof that this daft concept of selling an "experience" has gone too far! Witness the growing popularity of Xfce, as more and more people are ditching their digital baubles and going back to human/computer interfaces that deliver REAL productivity) have forgotten about delivering "what works" and decided that they want to sell you an "experience". Never mind that an experience is actually a perception of an event - not a product - and they're all just falling over themselves to put human-computer interfaces back 20 years in favour of more eye candy. Does the Ribbon actually help me, or simply gobble up valuable desktop real estate and get in my way? Does Metro help, or is it just another hindrance?
To be honest, I found myself doing the job quicker with Office 2003 and XP 64-bit, so I simply stopped giving money to Microsoft (Intel and NVidia, on the other hand, have done very nicely out of me - largely thanks to their continued driver support and compelling new products.) Even Intel's own C/C++ compiler software has proven to be worth the subscription charge that I pay for my Windows and Linux licences for Parallel Studio XE. Microsoft's Visual Studio has gotten less and less useful for C programming since 2005 - and if you don't want to induce howls of laughter, you'd better not discuss Visual Studio 2012's new "visual experience". All-caps menus? Yummy.
The computer I use is a tool used for achieving tasks - work: I do not expect - or want - to be sold an "experience" - because, 9 times out of 10, the actual experience is one of irritation. Ironically, when productivity software focuses on entertainment value at the expense of utility, it loses both entertainment and utility value (as far as I am concerned, anyway.)
Don't talk to me about Metro. There are some who think that the full-screen "experience" is an advancement. Quite frankly, I enjoyed the full-screen "experience" on my Commodore 64, back in the day - and I don't think it is a new or improved concept: Rather, I think Metro deserves to stay in the past, where it belongs. At least the Commodore 64 had Creatures and Armalyte...
If you want your vehicle to perform better....
Then the best advice anyone can get is to "go on a course to learn how to drive faster", much better value than a racing air filter, a tuned up engine, or a 5K race exhaust. Strangely IT departments (managers I'm looking at you) dont seem to agree. I am a consultant and deal with a mix of large and small clients in London, one of my favourite questions to the CIO who has "just bought into the NetApp/Cisco/IBM/etc dream" is to ask them... "So who in this room is going to be the NetApp/etc guru, who is going to inhabit the product day and night, who is going to become "an animal" at NetApp". Normally this is met with blank stares, of course the unspoken 2nd part is that "nobody here is capable of operating all the features and functions you are talking about".
I'm an old-time Solaris/Oracle guy, mainframe class reliability, uptimes measures in years, etc. Putting high end products and complexity in the hands of the average IT monkey, with poor operational discipline/rigor is not going to work.
Business is king.
Too many in IT have forgotten why they are in IT, and exactly how and why they are fed.
You can evangelise technology until you're blue in the face, but if it delivers no meaningful value to a business, why should it be adopted by that business? This is a question many IT vendors should be asking, but aren't.
The new Office Garage series:
