The Undercover IT Correspondent

GOOD GUY AND BAD GUY TECHNOLOGIES

IT technology change is usually driven by organizational politics

 

After the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, journalists fantasized about mining colonies on the moon (never mind the monotonous scenery and the terrible economics of transporting coal across a quarter million miles). Well, similar fantasies occur within IT every time a new technology appears. Like the moon colonies, there is always a hype cycle that starts with a selling proposition that’s just too good to be true – often fuelled by journalistic flights of fancy – followed a few years later by a reality check. The script, as predictable as a Hollywood movie, runs something like this:

 

·         Selling proposition: New ‘good guy’ technology appears, which is invariably sexier, simpler and so much better than the old, ‘bad guy’ technology.

·         Reality check: New technology doesn’t take over the world after all, and the old technology sticks around for a long time still because: (i) the new technology has yet to acquire the economics of usage and the reliability of the old technology (ii) we wrongly assume that the old technology is standing still and not getting any better or cheaper.

 

A 19^th century economist of no uncertain notoriety once drafted a manifesto whose opening words were: ‘The history of all past society is the history of the struggle between classes’. Well, if this person were around today and applied his observations to the world of IT, all he’d have to do is change a few words and he’d have a new manifesto which this time round he’d have gotten right, and for which he’d get full Marx: ‘The history of all IT innovation is the history of the struggle between classes’.

 

Most IT innovations are of the ‘revolutionary’ kind, often accompanied by ‘holy wars’, in which a new technology is embraced as much for reasons of organizational politics as for addressing actual business requirements. There is invariably a struggle between some parts of the organization, or between some vendors. Fuelled by a passion generated by some ongoing conflict, one of these classes seizes upon a new technology to advance its particular organizational aims (eg decentralization) or commercial aims (eg crushing a competitor). It then raises high the banner emblazoned with the new technology, and basically tells some other class, as Woody Allen so eloquently put it, to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ – though not in those words. This enables a lot of people to make money publishing magazines, newspapers and books to cater to the faithful and play the various groups against each other, as we shall now see.

 

MAINFRAMES – THE GREAT DICTATOR

 

When mainframes first appeared in the fifties, their size, weight and floor space were so impressive that science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov actually predicted that most of their bulk would eventually have to be placed in space (otherwise where on earth would you put it?). Mainframes were therefore associated with a technical caste of high priests who spoke in terms of bits, bytes, MIPS and FLOPS, and saw themselves as the enlightened pioneers of a new age which only they could really understand. They consequently favored heavy-handed central control of both the technical and business environments. By the sixties therefore, the bubble was ready to burst and the time was ripe for a revolt, which came in the form of the minicomputer.

 

MINICOMPUTERS – GOING IT ALONE

 

By the mid-sixties, a new company called DEC (Decentralized Entry-level Computers) had firmly established itself as the leader in a new class of machines called minicomputers. The ascent of this new class of machine had as much to do with organizational politics as with technology (it boasted technological improvements like transistors instead of vacuum tubes –  and a novelty called a video monitor).

 

When decentralized business units analyzed their internal allocations or charge-backs to central IT, they found that they compared very favorably with the price of low-cost minicomputers from DEC. On a purely hardware purchase-price basis therefore, they found they could easily justify the creation of their own IT departments, which began to spring up left, right and center. Minicomputers thus ushered in a new information age, suitably ‘liberated’ from the yoke of central IT, whose mainframe-based monopoly began to crumble.

 

Over time, however, the decentralized IT departments running minicomputers became victims of their success. Though they rightly viewed themselves as far more responsive to the business than the original mainframe dictatorships, they also found it difficult to cope with the huge increase in demand for their services.  Financial reality also caught up with them, as it gradually became clear that computing costs went far beyond the initial price tag on the hardware. So even the decentralized computer departments found themselves suffering a fate similar to that of their previous central masters, albeit on a much smaller scale.

 

So by the mid-seventies, another bubble was ready to burst. The time was ripe for yet another revolt, which came with the arrival of the microcomputer or PC.

 

MICROCOMPUTERS – RAISING THE MIDDLE FINGER

 

In 1976 Apple was created in a garage –  thereby ensuring for posterity the mythical status of the garage as a great place to start a business. And when it brought out its first microcomputers in the mid-seventies, users for the first time in history were able to use computers on a purely individual basis. And once microcomputers could be networked together, the stage was set for another round of ‘liberation’ from the IT Department ‘oppressors’.

 

When IBM itself eventually joined the fray in 1981 with its PC, the momentum snowballed.  Dealers took orders for 250,000 units on the first day, whereas IBM had expected to sell 275,000 units over the product’s entire lifetime of five years – talk about giving forecasting a bad name.

 

Whereas the previous minicomputer revolution was pure organizational politics between centralized and decentralized cultures, the new microcomputer revolution went further and added an ideological dimension. It was not enough to want better computing services in the enterprise; one also had to take a stance in favor of the individualism and freedom that microcomputers supposedly embodied. This implied the overthrow of the central IT dictatorships with their mainframes and minicomputers, symbolized by the oppressive Darth Vader and his evil empire, a.k.a. IBM. One newspaper even proclaimed itself ‘The Voice of Personal Computing in the Enterprise’, and in 1991 its editor-in-chief went as far as predicting that the last mainframe would be unplugged in 1995! This prediction was all the more misplaced given that around this time, both Microsoft and Apple were using very large IBM minicomputers to run their own businesses, and showed absolutely no signs of wanting to unplug them!

 

Apple had the GUI field to itself for six whole years, from 1984 to 1990, which gave Bill Gates every reason to be mad at Steve Jobs for threatening his dreams of world domination. Bill’s take on this was ‘don’t get mad, get Steven’, so he quietly went away and prepared his revenge. When Microsoft came out with a workable version of Windows in 1990, Apple’s fate was sealed as far as corporate IT was concerned. It also lost the ill-conceived lawsuit against Microsoft for copying its GUI, since Apple itself had copied the idea from Xerox (itself a copier company…).

 

WEB 2.0  - HERE WE GO AGAIN?

 

It would be nice to think that the organizational ‘holy wars’ and ‘class struggles’ ended with the mainframe-mini-micro technology battles above, but this was not to be the case. Organizational politics by technology proxy continued with NCs (that’s Network Computers for the newbies) vs PCs, Navigator vs Explorer, client/server vs host computing and OS/2 vs NT. All of these battles were always about more than just technology; they were also about ‘good guys’ vs ‘bad guys’. Adopting them would not just enable you to better resolve your business or technical problems; they would also ‘liberate’ you from some ‘undesirable’ part of the organization, or from some ‘undesirable’ vendor.

 

And with Web 2.0 we’re coming full circle again. Many articles on this new wave of computing are already evoking the apparent inability of the traditional IT department to come to grips with it. Now throw in some ‘digital generation’ stuff for good measure, and one part of the organization will soon be seeking 2.0 ‘liberation’ and telling some other part of the organization to go ‘be fruitful and multiply’ – though not in those words. MG