SteveJ-restore-test

Posted to "Tribe Predictions" on "I, Cringely" around early Jan, 2007. [Early April 2007: Paul Graham of Y Combinator posted Microsoft is dead , meaning they have become the established player, not a Revolutionary Force to be reckoned with.] Following MSFT's profit growth of Jul-2005 where it dipped below 10% for the first time, I feel they are going to hit a financial 'pothole' within 2 years and a full-blown financial crisis within 5. Remember that IBM declared record profits every year until their bottom-line collapsed. "Microsoft" as a brand will be around for a long, long time. Even if the company got bailed-out or taken over, there are too many products and too much of an installed base to evaporate quickly. If it ever became a minority platform, they would draw those wanting to be 'special and different' and enjoyed the bit-twiddling required - like Linux early adopters. MSFT don't strike me a company that has the insight o...

Here's the deal: Commercial I.T. is generally poorly done - if only because it can't be proven otherwise. It's been that way for 50 years. Many people have attempted to define, measure and address these endemic problems - with very limited success. There are simple remedies, but the people who 'write the cheques' aren't implementing them. What's Going On? The problems with I.T. are not technical, nor within the industry. [It's not a 'profession' under any definition.] Something else is going on: it's outside I.T. - the "meta-level" - the people that employ and manage us... And it's been very consistent over time - provably for more than 40 yeras. And it's cross-cultural - every country was affected by "Y2K". It was foreseeable, completely avoidable, and at no additional cost, if remediation had been generally started around 1992. [There have been many, many "Clock Roll-overs" in the history of computin...