IT Snake Oil — Six Tech Cure-Alls That Went Bunk 483
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Dan Tynan surveys six 'transformational' tech-panacea sales pitches that have left egg on at least some IT department faces. Billed with legendary promises, each of the six technologies — five old, one new — has earned the dubious distinction of being the hype king of its respective era, falling far short of legendary promises. Consultant greed, analyst oversight, dirty vendor tricks — 'the one thing you can count on in the land of IT is a slick vendor presentation and a whole lot of hype. Eras shift, technologies change, but the sales pitch always sounds eerily familiar. In virtually every decade there's at least one transformational technology that promises to revolutionize the enterprise, slash operational costs, reduce capital expenditures, align your IT initiatives with your core business practices, boost employee productivity, and leave your breath clean and minty fresh.' Today, cloud computing, virtualization, and tablet PCs are vying for the hype crown." What other horrible hype stories do some of our seasoned vets have?
disappointing... (Score:5, Funny)
The Cloud (Score:5, Funny)
It has vaporware all over it.
I don't see anything wrong with this list... (Score:5, Funny)
We need to bring about a paradigm shift, to think outside the box, and produce a clear synergy between cloud computing and virtualization.
Re:The Cloud (Score:2, Funny)
Clouds are actually water vapors. So it literally is vaporware.
Tech cure-all missing option: emacs (Score:5, Funny)
Apparently it cures everything but RSI.
Re:The crazy hottie (Score:2, Funny)
I still remember a visit from a PC sales rep that was hired straight off the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleading squad. OMG I bet she could sell computers.
Re:In Defense of Artificial Intelligence (Score:2, Funny)
Artificial intelligence is trying to make computers do things that are currently very hard for a computer to do, but very easy for a human to do. Once there are ubiquitous algorithms / hardware to do something as fast as a human can, we remove it from the category of "things computers will never be able to do as well as people."
Re:Machine translation replacing human translation (Score:3, Funny)
"Let's just say the technology is not quite there yet"
aka
"Pertaining to the acceptability, us, speaking of the mechanical acumen almost has arrived, still"
ERP is snake oil? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:In Defense of Artificial Intelligence (Score:3, Funny)
You repeat yourself, Mr. eldavojohn.
Re:I don't see anything wrong with this list... (Score:5, Funny)
Damn it all, man. Your don't produce synergy! You leverage synergy. Please get it right will you? The sooner you do, the sooner you can return to your core competency and synthesize some maximum value for your investors. M'kay?
Re:In Defense of Artificial Intelligence (Score:5, Funny)
I don't think so but the possibility can't be ruled out without further investigation. Have you ever tried to expose a database application to users and subsequently lost all faith in humanity?
Re:Virtualization has worked (Score:3, Funny)
Umm, welcome to reality.
That would be a win-win-win (Score:3, Funny)
When it's all said and done, that's a good day.
Re:Microsoft silverlight (Score:1, Funny)
That went over real well once they saw user visits drop by almost half...
Perhaps your visitors were able to accomplish twice as much in each visit :)
Re:What? CASE was a success! (Score:3, Funny)
Since when are PHP programmers human ?
<matrix-parody> .NET
I'd like to share a revelation I've had with you, it came to me when I tried to classify your programmers. Every programmer on this planet forms a natural equilibrium with the software project, but you PHP programmers do not. You multiply and multiply script snippets until every semblance of readability and logic is removed. And then you simply spread to another project. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is, Morpheus ?
</matrix-parody>
Re:In Defense of Artificial Intelligence (Score:5, Funny)
I'm still getting therapy.
We had a simple field on a form to "Supply a Telephone Number". The users didn't, so we used JS to validate they had filled it in.
Then they filled in garbage, so we enforced numerals only. The users entered "1111111" everywhere.
Then we enforced standard number formats based on a Country selector, with correct International Dialling Codes and pattern / format matching. The users entered "0044 (1)1111111" everywhere.
Finally we checked that the numbers didn't look like "0044 (1)1111111" i.e. too many repeated characters, after extensive testing to avoid false-positives. The users now enter "0044 (1)2121212" everywhere.
The more you Idiot-Proof a system, the smarter the Idiots become. Not smarter at actually entering the correct data, just smarter at bypassing the protections you put in place.
Re:My Meta-assessment (Score:2, Funny)
But what if they say "Yes!"
Re:In Defense of Artificial Intelligence (Score:1, Funny)
"In fact, this was an internal web based app for our office, which dealt with hotel reservations."
"If I had your form to fill in, I'd either abandon it or put in your main switchboard, or a phone sex number."
lol
to present is good (Score:2, Funny)
Their 'reasoning' is too bizarre to get around so all I can do is document that adding more connections 'probably' will not cut down on the company's connection costs.
Re:In Defense of Artificial Intelligence (Score:5, Funny)
Well, we tried ringing them...