Over on ZDnet (or is it zdNET?), Larry Dignan asks "Where have all the young boys gone?" Larry is concerned that the boring nature of business will discourage young engineers from working on business-related (vs. "social") automation challenges. (More accurately, he is posing the question as opposed to being overly concerned.)
Not to worry, Larry. Do young information-technology engineers like to eat?. Drive fast cars? Have kids?
Engineers will actually do what they have always done. (And business has always been boring.) Technologists don't start by choosing an enterprise vs. social (collaboration) challenge. Every development in enterprise technology since the beginning started with an industry challenge, not a technology challenge. Many of today's challenges simply relate to the telecommunications services industry, thus it appears that there is an undue tilt to "social blah blah blah.". Yesterday's were more related to manufacturing and financial services (can you spell credit default swap in Perl?).
After all the three hottest companies of the last decade (that actually had a revenue stream), as Larry mentions, were VMware (VMW), Google (GOOG) and salesforce.com (CRM). There is some myth that these are new-age social-centric technology efforts but, from a revenue perspective, , VMware simply marketized a 50-year old swapping technology once the silicon caught up (and is owned by a boring old disk-drive manufacturer, EMC), Google is simply a publisher support system, and salesforce.com is just ACT (now part of SAGE I think) on steroids.
Thirty years ago, word processing was just a typography system. Email replaced something a few readers will remember with fondness: the highly interactive ( :) )TWX network. You could get a reply from halfway around the world, sometimes as soon as the next day. Tomorrow's most immediate need is better healthcare delivery automation. After that, who knows but whatever it is it will be industry centric (probably an industry that does not yet exist since the existing industries are heavily automated.)
Nor does it matter if the engineers come from Heidleberg, Manchester, Route 128, Silicon Valley or Bangalore, which was one of Larry's side questions. The center of IT advancement has been moving steadily westward forever. Next step, is full circle back to Eastern Europe.
-- Dennis Byron
(no interest in companies mentioned.)
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