IDG

As I was trolling through the endless email feeds from the various IDG publications, including an article from InfoWorld on the 12 year anniversary of the birth of open source, and the ongoing push and pull between "free" software and monetized software, it occurred to me that IDG itself is a great symbol of the equivalent of open source in the publishing world. One gets all this "source" (information) for free, but the delivery is wrapped in a multitude of revenue streams, from the preponderance of ads that overwhelm their publications, to the ability to push the advertiser's products to a quantized subscriber base via email feeds. Much like Gartner, you have one company that publishes news, product reviews, and industry trends while at the same time charging clients for a multitude of pay-for services in the same arena. InfoWorld and ComputerWorld between them are consumed in one shape or another by I would guess 95% of the "decision-makers" with "purchase power" in the IT world. IDG is a $3.2 billion dollar corporation employing 13,000 people, including many "industry experts". Talk about a lack of a Chinese wall.

End of e-mail

Article in NY Times today about the end of e-mail. What's missing is mention of the fact that texting doesn't preserve as a narrative. Sure, the streams stay on the phones until they are deleted by the user (something Tiger should have figured out how to do) and backups probably exist beyond that for a certain length of time with the telcoms. But one of the beauties of e-mail is the elimination of paper, pen, and the postal service from an exchange of letters. For some of us who were letter writers before Al Gore invented the web, this was huge. Not because we didn't have to physically write (since typewriters and the equivalent of "boarding" already existed), but both because a form of composing was now much easier (no white-out needed), and most importantly, responses could be near instant, which was the beginning of the concept of electronic conversation.

So, the fact that this is not instant enough for the Millennials is in itself interesting. But the concept that e-mail is not "conversational" enough,  is to me what is most interesting. True though this is, letters are not truly conversations in the way that oral conversations are. The back and forth is much more extended on each end. The increased magnitude of this data (the words of a letter) requires much greater structure to be intelligible. Letter writing in itself is an art form, and like all art forms requires some discipline to be good. Even if you are able to spontaneously riff, or blow like a great musician, there were still hours of practice prior to that moment to enable it. So if you didn't practice your scales, the bulk of what you emit will be pointless noise anyway and it doesn't matter if it is instantly instant or kind of instant. If you have practiced, and the person you are jamming (texting) with has practiced, a given text stream can be kind of neat and tuneful. Still, it will eventually be lost unless you are obsessive enough to download all your text conversations and preserve them. (This could be dangerous, as Tiger demonstrated). So it gets me back to e-mail. It may be dead when I and all my cohorts are dead, but not until then.

The Three Letter Acronym

CRM, ERP, CMS, BPM - the list goes on and on. All these acronyms represent a potential source of revenue for software and consulting firms, a means for incompetent people within a business to demonstrate their knowledge and expertise by chanting these acronyms like a mantra, and a good excuse for an all expenses paid conference in a nice location. Oh yeah - they are also supposed to add value to your business. Many of these things start deep within the bowels of the Gartner Group which has created a self-perpetuating business and revenue stream out of creating and or promoting concepts like these three letter acronyms in conjunction with the software development firms and consulting companies that pay them, and then convincing people of their importance by charting them in a "magic quadrant".

Let me just say that it is important to manage the relationships you have with your customers, manage the resources in your business or "enterprise", manage the content that you spew out externally as the marketing of your business or spew in internally as the information that helps your business run and manage the processes that drive your business, but anyone who has ever run their own business understands this intrinsically and may not need software or consultants to help them manage this. Let me back up - there is undoubtedly software that can help them manage these basic processes, and possibly people who can lend them valuable advice, but that doesn't mean it should be packaged, labeled and sold as a commodity. Then again - if the conference is in Hawaii, you can bet that I am aboard...

In The Beginning Was the Word

In the beginning was the word, and the word was Job. The mighty Job took the cards fed to it and spewed out answers...

This blog is a running rant about the world of information technology and its denizens. The natural audience are those in the field, though anyone with a prurient interest in the inner working of the geek brain should tune in. This is not a technology blog. It will not discuss the latest AJAX library or the coolness of substituting LINQ for standard data layer calls. It is a philosophy blog. We are surrounded and inundated by technology, and as many people exist who lament on the need to escape it as those who worship its latest incarnation. We consume it and are consumed by it. The younger you are (past the age of 12), and assuming you live in modern, non-3rd world culture, the more likely you are to have no frame of reference outside the devices that shape your world. The older you are, the more likely you are to wonder just what in the hell has happened.

I work in the world of IT (or at least I used to until I was laid off) and have been immersed in it for the last 20 plus years, living through the transformation from a main-frame centric, TSO, flat file, batch job world to the Twit that consumes us today.

The one truth that has not changed in all that time is the title of this blog, which is "Data In, Data Out". This is still what drives all the technology around you. But each day the "data in" comes from more and richer sources, and the "data out" is transformed in more and richer ways. Actually, "rich" may be the wrong word, since most of what is coming in and out is garbage. Perhaps "dense" is the better description. We have tweets, messages, emails, blogs, subscriptions and the ability to pro-actively hunt through the billions of terabytes of information at our disposal. But in our daily life we also have a great deal of natural noise in our surroundings, most of which we filter out so that we can focus on what is important. This is how the brain is wired. If it wasn't wired this way, we would all be schizophrenic. Which may be what is slowly happening in the wired world where many have trouble filtering.

In the beginning was a single source (some punch cards) and a single output and it was focused. Modern business is still looking for focus though from a myriad of sources. Modern people are still looking for a focus though they are stimulated beyond a point that allows for that sort of focus.

Thus is born this blog - seemingly adding to that noise, yet trying to filter it. Entries will be short so they are easy to consume, but hopefully regular so there is some continuity. The ultimate goal is to stimulate discussion, though a forum in which to rant is in itself a release. This could be the proverbial tree falling in a forest that no one hears...