More insights on intelligent versus dumb LANs
"The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it."
William Gibson
Dear Vorticians,
Last week, I ran a quote without attribution - "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." - and asked readers to help me track down the author. Vortician Tim Bakke tipped me off that the most likely source of the statement was the sci-fi writer William Gibson.
As Vortician Bakke writes, "I seemed to recall it was in a Wired article and found it through a Google search: Click here and check out the last paragraph. Actually, Google brought up many references to the quote, attributed to Gibson, but it would be nice to get the definitive nugget. I LOVE technology!"
That last comment sparked a brief exchange between yours truly and Vortician Bakke on what exactly we all did on a daily basis before the Web and Google and IM and Blackberry's. We're not talking ancient history here, one need only go back about 15 years and we're in the Dark Ages relatively speaking. I guess I used the phone a lot more, along with those pink message slips, but - seriously - how the heck did we get anything done? (I suppose some could argue that we were more productive. Gibson's other quote above presents both sides of that argument in a subtle way.)
Anyway, it turns out the provenance of the quote is more than a bit murky. And, thanks to the aforementioned Google search, you can read this enjoyable tale of one man's efforts to track down where these pearls of wisdom originated. Click and enjoy.
I also received the following note from Martha Young, co-founder of the Nova Amber consultancy, in response to my recent piece on intelligent versus dumb LANs. It also relates to last week's piece on selling complexity versus selling simplicity, which has drawn a good deal of response from readers. (You can read both pieces online in the Vortex Blog archive, which is found here.)
Vortician Young wrote: "John, interesting article this week. We have been watching the intelligent LAN conundrum throughout 2005. The way we see it, this isn't an either/or dilemma. However, we do anticipate major shifts in IT strategy over the next few years from companies of all sizes. We are starting to see these changes in the small business space, with the expansion of business process outsourcing and the uptake in adoption of virtualization.
"If we accept the argument that IT has become too complex and out of control, then handing over the reigns to an outsourcer, or going down the path of virtualization makes a lot of sense. In this scenario, thin clients would be the norm, apps would be web-enabled, and security would be the responsibility of the service provider.
"If we accept the argument that moving to a commodities environment reduces complexity, then heavily embedded intelligence throughout the LAN would not be part of the overall commodities strategy. An excellent example of commodity to reduce complexity is Google's infrastructure; tons of redundancy and duplicity at fractions of the cost of a proprietary environment.
"If we accept the argument that companies are going back to their roots, focusing on their core business and outsourcing or spinning out all other non-core functions, then IT would be near the top of the list as a candidate for handing-off to a specialist. It is highly unlikely that an intelligent infrastructure would be necessary if the functions are Web-enabled and supported off site.
On the other hand, we are seeing an awful lot of mongo contracts being terminated, problems with outsourcing implementations, etc. The net of these issues is that companies are backing up and taking smaller steps, outsourcing a piece of the process rather than the entire process. Success is built incrementally.
"There are numerous days worth of discussion on the topic of intelligent LANs vs. outsourcing and virtualization that really can't be said in a few paragraphs. We look forward to participating in the on-going discussions on these topics."
Thanks, Vortician Young. The outsourcing point adds an interesting wrinkle. Perhaps building lots of intelligence into the infrastructure is the right answer, but it's not appropriate for each enterprise to do it. If intelligent infrastructure is the way to go, it would make a lot of sense for the investment to be done centrally - the service provider builds and manages the secure, apps-aware network that is shared by many customers.
Food for thought anyway. If you've got any more entrees to bring to the table, ship them to me here
Bye for now.
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