When OS Wars Become Irrelevant

As an 8 year Linux user, I've long (at least by IT technology standards) been immersed in the mentality of the free-speech and free-beer software idealism of the GPL (GNU's Not Unix!). But in the last 3 years working in a Windows-pc office where at the start, most of my time was spent resetting people's various passwords and showing them how they can retrieve their Outlook send mail button when they've lost it (no lie), I've grown too distant from the geek camaraderie of my undergrad days. Back then, Friday nights were often spent packing up the pc and heading over to a friend's 1-bedroom efficiency to lan and cram with friends and classmates among the Ethernet cabling and power cords strung like copper-core spaghetti across the walls and windows. Nostalgia aside, one reason I've decided to come back to school, and to MIS in particular, is because I felt it would be good to broaden my understanding of the IT world, and find a structure to force me out of the head-in-the-trenches workaday habit.

Then I listen to Tim O'Reilly talk about The Software Paradigm Shift, and a hundred things start to become clear (almost as fast as the caffeine-induced synapses fire hyperdrive in my soon-to-be-aching head). How many of you use Linux? Think carefully, this shouldn't be a trick question, but it is. Tim is not just asking how many of you use Linux on your own PC, he wants to know how many of you use Google, web-based email, shop online. Cause if you do, chances are you use Linux. We may be coming to a point where the OS wars are truly becoming irrelevant.

Now think about network computing in general. There's talk of a time coming when we move to using applications over the network. We've started already -- again, there's that online email you use (and isn't it nice to be able to access that no matter where you are?). Tax time is coming, do you use an online tax service? Have you cancelled your paper bank and credit card statements because it's so much easier to reconcile your accounts online and you just don't want the clutter? How many checks did you write last month, vs. five years ago? How many online shops have your credit card information stored for future purchases? You think you wouldn't want to give up Word on your pc, but if you've written here, aren't you using a network word processor? How about that new Gmail app that lets you check your email from your web-enabled cell phone? And how many people do you know who have World of Warcraft accounts? Network computing may not be so far off as we think.

As ProfessorCraig mentioned in class, we seem to be moving back full circle to a centralized computing framework. Where before the computers and the technology were all proprietary and this locked in the company's ownership of them, now it works because the technology is so very ubiquitous that anyone can gain access to the information and services they want (well, maybe everyone except the guy who's still trying to figure out where his "send mail" button went to).

In thinking of all this from a business perspective, I wonder if some of the success of these forms of business are to do with economies of scale made cheap. Technological information at its basic level costs less than pennies to reproduce once the initial startup costs are invested. The value lies not so much in the products themselves as in the way they are put together. Peer to peer networks like Napster and the peer-to-peer client-server hybrids like Google, Amazon, and eBay are showing us that the village is logging in, and the village is contributing. Google uses the aggregate data of millions (and counting) of website links (deriving the value of a website's worth by the number of links that point to it) to tell you where you are most likely to find the information you're looking for. EBay's value is attributed to it simply by the flux of users that shop and sell there every minute. There seems to be a fiat value system at work here, fed by the critical mass of individuals who use those services. IT may very well be changing the way business models work in some arenas.

For those worried that IT is dead, that it is being commoditized into a near invisible infrastructure, you seem to be missing the forest for the trees. While Carr makes some very good points in his article "IT Doesn't Matter" in the May 2002 issue of The Harvard Business Review, he seems to be looking too narrowly at the field of IT, looking backwards at what IT has already achieved and using that as the measuring stick that says it's near the end of its run. Those who will prove him wrong will do so by standing on the shoulders of technology's predecessors, all the way back to fire and metalworking and electricity, to gain a better look forward into the infinite complexity that computing and its organization can offer.

Bewildering, isn't it? If you just got a sense of vertigo, you understand my point of view. Happy flying!

Contextual Personality Disorder

Greetings fellow classmates and wanderers of the web! As a quick intro, I'm posting some ruminations I had a few months back on my other journal space. While I'll generally be posting thoughts on school-related topics (I'm a Masters MIS student at UCF), I'll occasionally venture into other areas. I look forward to your comments.

Contextual Personality Disorder

I'm suddenly feeling intrigued at the multitude of personality faces so many of us seem to carry. Places such as these online as anonymous as we choose, we define ourselves in ways that fit better, being chosen, than what we were born into. We're not locked into the realities of family, job, expectations here and so can be what we want, who we want, envisioned and projected Matrix-like as our ideal selves.

This flourishing is due as much to the possibilities afforded us by an alternate world that exists in what most call the internet. This is a space that runs, web-like, with no real center, organic in its ability to heal broken routes, sending speed-of-light traffic down alternate pathways faster than any human can innately fathom. This network has grown to the point where it reaches into almost every household and makes available worlds real and imaginary to the most secluded and cut-off individuals. For those of us who were born on the cusp of this age and remember schools that weren't connected to computers or the internet in any visible way, do we have trouble understanding the gestalten knowledge of those who grew into the technology from infancy? Will we always be a little clumsier, a little slower in picking up the intricacies? Yes, unless we chase down the knowledge and pull it into our own cognitive framework, and maybe even then.

I once heard that you can measure the stress level of a society by the smallest unit of time that it measures. I wonder, then, in this microsecond economy of activity, what that means for our collective peace of mind? What rules will need changing in the future? What shifts in paradigms will we have to absorb or refute, and most likely refute to our own disadvantage?

Then there's the social aspect that I see evident when walking through a college campus now vs. even only 5 years ago. Two out of three are on their cell phones, connected remotely and continually to someone somewhere else, and utterly refusing to even notice the people passing 2 feet away. We're connected to the other side of the world, and our housemates and neighbors are strangers.

I honestly don't know if this is saddening, or heartening.