IT Snake Oil — Six Tech Cure-Alls That Went Bunk

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?

Overhyped, but note quite snake oil

[Jyms]

I got interested in AI in the early 90's and even then the statements made in the article were considered outrageous by people who actually knew what was going on. I use AI on a daily basis, from OCR to speech and gesture recognition. Even my washing machine claims to use it. Not quite thinking for us and taking over the world, but give it some time :).

Same with thin clients. Just today I put together a proposal for three 100 seat thin client (Sunray) labs. VDI allows us to use Solaris, multiple Linux flavors, Minix, Windows, pretty much any OS we wish at the click of a mouse. The biggest problem is guessing what is going to happen now that Oracle is taking over, not the technology/architecture. Yes, Windows (CE) "thin clients" suck and are not very thin, but real think clients are quite handy.

A lot of these technologies were/are hopelessly over-hyped, but that is not a fault with the technology, but a problem with the idiots doing the hyping.

Re:In Defense of Artificial Intelligence

[ceoyoyo]

"CASE" isn't entirely bunk either. CASE as CASE might be, but computer aided software design isn't. Perhaps most here are now too young to remember when, if you wanted a GUI, you had to design it by hand, positioning all the elements manually in code and then linking things up manually, in code.

Now almost nobody designs a GUI without a RAD tool of some kind. You drop your GUI elements on the window and the tool generates code stubs for the interaction. That's way, way nicer, and way, way faster than, for example, setting up transfer records for a Windows 3.1 form.

Re:Why Artificial Intelligence may never exist

[Grishnakh]

The most obvious counterexample to the "AI" nonsense is to consider that, back around 1800 or any time earlier, it was obvious to anyone that the ability to count and do arithmetic was a sign of intelligence. Not even smart animals like dogs or monkeys could add or subtract; only we smart humans could do that.

Interestingly, in recent years, many animals have been found to be able to perform simple mathematical tasks.

Dolphins:
http://www.apa.org/monitor/sep05/marine.html [apa.org]
Monkeys:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,317526,00.html [foxnews.com]
Dogs can do calculus:
http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20031008/Feature1.asp [sciencenewsforkids.org]

Brute force is how humans do it

[mangu]

That $20 DSP does nothing but a brute force search on certain sound patterns. This is not in any way similar to how humans process speech

Huh? In the ear, "thousands of "hair cells" are set in motion, and convert that motion to electrical signals that are communicated via neurotransmitters to many thousands of nerve cells" [wikipedia.org]. Wouldn't you say the joint work of "thousands of nerve cells" is exactly what "brute force" is about?

The reason why artificial intelligence still seems so distant is because no artificial computer has the brute force of the human brain. The average brain has tens of billions of neurons, each of which can process thousands of inputs a few hundreds times per second.

Although computers have been able to simulate smaller assemblages of neurons very precisely, simulating the full scope of a human brain is still off reach, even for Google.

Re:In Defense of Artificial Intelligence

[DocDJ]

Having taken several courses on AI, I never found a contributor to the field that promised it to be the silver bullet

<cough>Ontologies: A Silver Bullet for Knowledge Management and Electronic Commerce [amazon.com]</cough>

Having spent over ten years working professionally in the field, I've found this kind of thing to be all too common, especially among ambitious-but-talentless academics where grant applications are concerned, particularly where said grant applications contain the words "semantic" and "web" in close proximity - now that really is pure, undiluted snake oil. The semantic web community has received hundreds of millions of dollars/euros/pounds in funding and they've delivered nothing of any use. Zippo, zilch, zero. Compare this with enormous amounts of useful functionality delivered by the machine learning community. The difference is that machine learning is rigorous and can be really quite difficult, whereas the semantic web is based on the belief that 3-tuples are really neat.

Re:In Defense of Artificial Intelligence

[Tablizer]

Just when they invent flying cars to commute to work, AI robots will take your job away anyhow :-P