Are Information Technology's Glory Days Over?

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that computer science students with the entrepreneurial spirit may want to look for a different major, because if Thomas M. Siebel, founder of Siebel Systems, is right, IT is a mature industry that will grow no faster than the larger economy, its glory days having ended in 2000. Addressing Stanford students in February as a guest of the engineering school, Siebel called attention to 20 sweet years from 1980 to 2000, when worldwide IT spending grew at a compounded annual growth rate of 17 percent. 'All you had to do was show up and not goof it up,' Siebel says. 'All ships were rising.' Since 2000, however, that rate has averaged only 3 percent. His explanation for the sharp decline is that 'the promise of the post-industrial society has been realized.' In Siebel's view, far larger opportunities are to be found in businesses that address needs in food, water, health care and energy. Though Silicon Valley was 'where the action was' when he finished graduate school, he says, 'if I were graduating today, I would get on a boat and I would get off in Shanghai.'"

An apocalyptic view of computers and IT?

[Norsefire]

If everything anyone ever said about IT and computers came true, we would all have 640K memory.

Re:Go Biotech, young IT programmer!

[pooh666]

Yet where I work, we can't find enough people. Why? So few are able to really learn on their own and most jobs these days are a mixture of tech. So if you are a DBA, you are instantly not qualified at a lot of places, if that is really all you are.

Nothing to see here, please move along

[Doofus]

Siebel's comments were apparently uttered without any supporting homework. A glance at a graph does not a studied analysis make.

From TFA:

But the recent drop is not as steep as it seems at first. I asked Shane Greenstein, an economist at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management who has written extensively about the computer industry, to take a look at the raw data upon which those numbers were supposedly based: the annual I.T. spending estimates published by IDC.

Mr. Greenstein's calculations produced a more moderate compounded annual growth rate of 11.6 percent for 1980 to 2000, instead of 17 percent. (Mr. Siebel's personal assistant said last week that the 17 percent in the Stanford talk came from a staff member who calculated from a reading of a chart, not from precise figures.)

When Mr. Greenstein looked at the full IDC data set, which goes back to 1961, and used other breakpoints to compare growth in earlier and later periods, he found that the most golden years of I.T. were in the 1960s, when use of mainframe computers spread widely. From 1961 to 1971, the compounded annual growth rate was 35.7 percent, more than three times the rate in the 1980-2000 period celebrated by Mr. Siebel.

The article goes on to point out the obvious, that the percentage growth of an industry will decline as the installed base rises over time. Absolute growth in IT will continue - though it may not be gangbusters of old, IT will never be stagnant.

As other posters here have pointed out, many, (many) industries depend on the support infrastructure that IT provides to work effectively and efficiently. This will not change overnight. While some of this infrastructure has been substantially commoditized over the last 10 years or so, there will always be challenges that non-technical team-members cannot solve themselves. These challenges will require the participation of and collaboration with technologists in organizations that want to function at the high-performance end of the bell curve.

Re:Go Biotech, young IT programmer!

[MrKaos]

1. Download Chimera (It's free!)

Ahem! you could have pointed to the download page [ucsf.edu] where you can download it for a variety of platforms.

Re:Siebel has no vision.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. Look 5 years into the future, and all those one man shops will still be ... one man shops.

iPhone app developers are the equivalent of people who made a living off PC shareware in the 1990s. Nice beer money, but they'll never build a real business out of it.

And if one of them managed to come up with something that wasn't just a game or a gimmick, Apple would either buy them out or crush them.

Re:If it doesn't run on batteries ....

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Or, you know, we could build nuke plants.

Re:Go Biotech, young IT programmer!

[CuteSteveJobs]

> I'm having trouble coming up with a goal where biological chemicals are the answer.

Proteins are the language of cells. Many diseases have a basis in this messaging going wrong. You could e.g. create a protein molecule that seeks out incorrectly operating cells and patches their DNA, or simply finds the errant protein and binds with it or even changes it.

There are tools for designing molecules on your PC:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_Design_software [wikipedia.org]

In practice if you did design an uberdrug on your PC you'd get a lab to make it for you, but for the amateur home chemist this is an awesome book:
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596514921/ [oreilly.com]