Robert Cringley Predicted 'The Death of IT' in 2020. Was He Right? (cringely.com) 54
Yesterday long-time tech pundit Robert Cringley reviewed the predictions he'd made at the beginning of last year. "Having done this for over 20 years, historically I'm correct abut 70 percent of the time, but this year could be a disappointment given that I'm pretty sure I didn't predict 370,000 deaths and an economy in free-fall.
"We'll just have to see whether I was vague enough to get a couple right."
Here's some of the highlights: I predicted that IBM would dump a big division and essentially remake itself as Red Hat, its Linux company. Well yes and no. IBM did announce a major restructuring, spinning-off Global Technology Services just as I predicted (score one for me) but it has all happened slowly because everything slows down during a pandemic. The resulting company won't be called Red Hat (yet), but the rest of it was correct so I'm going to claim this one, not that anybody cares about IBM anymore...
I predicted that working from home would accelerate a trend I identified as the end of IT, by which I meant the kind of business IT provided and maintained by kids from that office in the basement. By working from home, we'd all become our own IT guys and that would lead to acceleration in the transition of certain technologies, especially SD-WAN and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)... "That's the end-game if there is one — everything in the cloud with your device strictly for input and output, painting screens compressed with HTML5. It's the end of IT because your device will no longer contain anything, so it can be simply replaced via Amazon if it is damaged or lost, with the IT kid in the white shirt becoming an Uber driver (if any of those survive)."
It was a no-brainer, really, and I was correct: Internet-connected hardware sales surged, SASE took over whether you even knew it or not, and hardly any working from home was enabled by technology owned by the business, itself. It's key here that the operant term for working from home became "Zooming" — a third-party public brand built solely in the cloud.
Finally, I predicted that COVID-19 would accelerate the demise of not just traditional IT, but also IT contractors, because the more things that could be done in the cloud the less people would be required to do them. So what actually happened? Well I was right about the trend but wrong about the extent. IT consulting dropped in 2020 by about 19 percent, from $160 billion to $140 billion. That's a huge impact, but I said "kill" and 19 percent isn't even close to dead. So I was wrong.
"We'll just have to see whether I was vague enough to get a couple right."
Here's some of the highlights: I predicted that IBM would dump a big division and essentially remake itself as Red Hat, its Linux company. Well yes and no. IBM did announce a major restructuring, spinning-off Global Technology Services just as I predicted (score one for me) but it has all happened slowly because everything slows down during a pandemic. The resulting company won't be called Red Hat (yet), but the rest of it was correct so I'm going to claim this one, not that anybody cares about IBM anymore...
I predicted that working from home would accelerate a trend I identified as the end of IT, by which I meant the kind of business IT provided and maintained by kids from that office in the basement. By working from home, we'd all become our own IT guys and that would lead to acceleration in the transition of certain technologies, especially SD-WAN and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)... "That's the end-game if there is one — everything in the cloud with your device strictly for input and output, painting screens compressed with HTML5. It's the end of IT because your device will no longer contain anything, so it can be simply replaced via Amazon if it is damaged or lost, with the IT kid in the white shirt becoming an Uber driver (if any of those survive)."
It was a no-brainer, really, and I was correct: Internet-connected hardware sales surged, SASE took over whether you even knew it or not, and hardly any working from home was enabled by technology owned by the business, itself. It's key here that the operant term for working from home became "Zooming" — a third-party public brand built solely in the cloud.
Finally, I predicted that COVID-19 would accelerate the demise of not just traditional IT, but also IT contractors, because the more things that could be done in the cloud the less people would be required to do them. So what actually happened? Well I was right about the trend but wrong about the extent. IT consulting dropped in 2020 by about 19 percent, from $160 billion to $140 billion. That's a huge impact, but I said "kill" and 19 percent isn't even close to dead. So I was wrong.
Re:What is IT? (Score:5, Insightful)
What is "IT" anyway? Seriously :D
Apparently, something that died in 2020.
For my company, everything in our IT grew. NetOps people found their VPN systems tested and expanded capabilities greatly. Security grew... and we brought on more developers (all of them contractors) for the incredible growth we saw due to the challenges brought on by dealing with COVID and the lockdowns (and how it affected our business).
There was no "death of IT" and anybody who predicts this, then claims they are right is insane.
Re:What is IT? (Score:4)
There is going to be a growing reversal. The big corps have really well and truly blown trust, those fuckers have become real psycho control freaks, insecure penny pinching greed obessesed arseholes who refuse to pay any taxes and seek to crush all other opposition for total dominace and control, not even fucking hyperbole, the reality.
This well drive a trend to avoid them and reach back to more local IT services, people you can talk to, people you can sue, people you have some control over, RATHER THAN THE OPPOSITE, it has become insane, the big tech corps controlling the customers rather than the other way around.
It will become more and more distasteful to deal with them, the damage is done and so more about localised IT services and support of open source software and hardware. Commodity stuff, anyone can assemble because that was safer, more reliable and you controlled it, rather than them trying to control you.
They are actively trying to lock out entire countries from them establishing and maintaining total control, as in M$ et al being part of the push to shutdown China tech growth (c'mon fellas, the tiny limpers are right in there in the halls of power, not just the contractor but the BOSS, they are right in there working hard to shutdown China so that M$ can maintain dominance, rather than China taking them out with FOSS hardware and software).
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No, communist theft empire of China is not going to serve as your bastion of liberties neither.
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It's Robert Cringly, he has an absurdly long history of getting paid for bad predictions that he just pulls out of his nether regions. He even seems proud of his utter inability to do even the most minimal research before making his specious predictions. If the TV weatherman had his record for predictions he'd be fired, but for some reason publishers keep paying him.
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You want to know me better
I do.
Give me your home address so I can find you.
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The "death of IT" helps pay my salary. As systems have expanded, and especially as managerial paperwork and procedures and sign-offs have grown, with mission statements and resource tracking Gant charts and project planning with meetings to plan the meetings to set the specs, software development has gained many layers. Words like "IT" and "Security" and "Network" mean very different things to different managers.
The result has been that what used to be "IT" has been narrowed in different ways in different c
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IT is a f*cking scaring living beings destroyer clown.
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I think for most people, it just means "the tech folks that keep our computers and networks running".
How "The Cloud" (tm) was supposed to accomplish that, I have no idea. Sure, many businesses used outsourced services, no longer running their own internal e-mail services, for example. This probably makes sense in small to medium sized businesses, in which technology is not their prime focus.
But beyond some generic services you no longer have to (mostly) manage yourself, you still need an internal team res
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I'm not entirely sure we're not far away from being to outsource almost everything. Imagine some concept where everyone has something like a Chromebook with very limited local functionality and most everything else accessed via web based apps or VDI.
Local network connectivity? Blanket the spaces with latest generation wifi and equip the local terminal with cellular data capability. This mostly reduces local network access to some kind of 5 year equipment replacement cycle, maybe even longer in practical
Re: What is IT? (Score:1)
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"I was with IT once, but then they changed what IT was" - Grandpa Simpson
what as azzhole (Score:3, Insightful)
i don't know who he is but he sounds like a real azzhole
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Re:what as azzhole (Score:5, Informative)
35 years of writing bullshit articles with click-bait headlines.
A Brief History of Robert X. Cringely
In 1986, Mark Stephens was hired as a writer by Inforworld magazine. Writing under the name Robert X. Cringely, he began his career as a professional bullshitter.
When he was fired a few years later, Stephens continued using the Cringely name and was sued by Infoworld. They eventually reached an agreement where he was allowed to use the Cringely name as long as he wasn't working for a competitor of Infoworld.
After Infoworld went out of business and there was no more danger of gtting sued, Stephens began claiming that he is "the original Robert X. Cringely". He isn't. Before he was hired by Infoworld there were at least two other people who wrote using the Cringely pseudonym.
At various points in his career, he has also claimed that he was employee number 12 at Apple, he helped them move out of Steve Jobs' garage, and he designed the original Mac trash can icon. None of this is true and its not even certain that Mark Stephens ever worked at Apple.
In 2015 Cringely announced "The Mineserver Project" on Kickstarter. These miniature Minecraft servers would be small, inexpensive ARM-based boards, running Linux, slightly more powerful than a Raspberry Pi and selling for $99. The project raised a total of $35,452 from 388 people and the finished boards were supposed to ship in December 2015. They didn't.
For two years Cringely repeatedly claimed that the Mineserver boards were finished and ready to ship but there was always "one more little thing" that needed to be fixed.
In July 2017 Cringely posted on his blog that he was suddenly blind from cataracts, but that he would have his sight restored in ten days so maybe everyone could stop asking about the Mineserver boards until then. Never mind that there's no such thing as having cataract surgery on both eyes at the same time, that's a minor detail.
Then in October 2017 Cringely claimed that his house burned down and all the Mineserver boards were destroyed. Just like the cataracts and his tenure at Apple, there is little evidence that this is actually true.
In May 2018 Cringely wrote on his blog that his insurance company would take 16 more months to pay him anything for his home, and that it might not pay for the melted Mineservers at all. But yet again, the promise: "We're back in the Mineserver business, preparing a successor model because the available boards and other parts have all changed. Every supporter will get their Mineserver before the end of the year."
All through 2018 there were repeated promises that money would be found somewhere, and the Mineservers would finally ship. But 2018 ended with nothing.
On June 7, 2019, Cringely posted his thoughts on "The Future of Television", not mentioning the Mineservers at all, and he didn't post anything to his blog for the rest of the year, although he was still posting about airplane trivia on Quora.com.
On January 23, 2020, Cringely's latest and biggest lie hit his blog when he announced his new business venture called Eldorado Space. This would be a company using F-104 jets to launch satellites. Cringely says revenue from this business will fund his retirement (he's 67 now) and give him enough money to finally deliver those Minecraft servers he's been promising for the last 5 years.
He also claimed that the business is guaranteed to succeed because his new company has bought all the F-104s in existence, so he won't have any competition. To prove this is all real and legitimate, Cringely found a picture of an F-104 on the Internet and photoshopped the word Eldorado onto it.
The truth and Robert X. Cringely are not well acquainted.
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I am pretty sure that cataract surgery is occasionally done on both eyes at the same time. As I recall, both of my parents were offered this option within the last decade.
https://www.allaboutvision.com... [allaboutvision.com]
"...Cataract surgeons who support the idea of SBCS point out that a significant percentage of cataract surgeries in some European countries are performed in this fashion with excellent resul
He makes generic predictions (Score:5, Informative)
AIs are the future of IT (Score:2)
This is what happens when one doesn't use AIs - you think it's the end of IT.
Cringely (Score:1)
Cringely has proven to me to be a racist and xenophobe, why do fools listen to him like he's God?
It's not even a he (Score:5, Informative)
Cringely is a pseudonym used by a series of snarky hacks. The latest one isn't any brighter than the previous ones.
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The "X" stands for "the lowest paid Infoworld intern that has yet to finish their journalism degree and doesn't actually know how anything works".
About "The Cloud" (Score:3)
I wonder if Mr. Cringely has heard that "the cloud" is actually a bunch of servers somewhere connected to each other, operated and managed by anonymous people and organizations who get paid to do what they do. We used to call them "contractors". In effect, using "the cloud" for your mission-critical applications is gambling on a unanimous vote of the individuals and devices required to get your work done every minute of every day. Better, I think, if you have hire and fire authority over the people responsible for you and your organization meeting its service objectives.
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The notion that the Cloud industry itself isn't just simply a bunch of contractors is ludicrous.
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Around $50 billion dollars in revenue last year for **just** AWS would seem to indicate that you're full of crap.
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They're contractors for whoever hires them to run their infra.
my prediction (Score:5, Funny)
This is the year I dump centos (Score:3)
Not quite, Cringely (Score:3)
The work-from-home explosion didn't kill off IT, it brought the need for business-level security, uptime, compute power and bandwidth home, literally. IT people (I'm one of them) are scrambling to upgrade home computing power to match the new need.
Meanwhile, we're about to see vacated downtown office space converted into residential units, especially in cities where rents are high. Imagine living in the city of your dreams, no commute, and having enterprise-grade IT in your complex.
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He was wrong as usual! (Score:3)
We moved or are moving all of environments dev ( multiple) test ( multiple) and prod ( multiple) to containers in the cloud. Using containerization we can fire up an instance of dev or test on the fly. Sure maybe people trucking keyboards and mice around the office decreased since we all work from home now. We added WAY more developers and devops folks to create all this cloud containerization and even some another oracle dba ( yes we still use Oracle.. no judging!). We also added more people to admin things like jira/confluence/bitbucket. We also added more security analysts too. Not sure what dingley thinks IT is. If it's JUST people bringing keyboards, mice and plugging in ethernet cables then yes... but by any other definition of IT it's grown by at lease 20+%
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We are moving most of our environments dev (multiple) stg (multiple) and prod (multiple) away from AWS and GCE because of their ridiculous egress b/w costs.
Also, why does AWS still not have interactive virtual serial console access to their vms? What a bunch of amateurs.
No, Zoom is not key (Score:1)
and hardly any working from home was enabled by technology owned by the business, itself. It's key here that the operant term for working from home became "Zooming" — a third-party public brand built solely in the cloud.
What's truly key is this being a nation-wide wave of businesses offloading more of their cost-of-business onto the finances of the employee. Like restaurants paying slave wages because they expect you to tip 18% on an overpriced, unimaginative meal loaded with fat and salt. The staff working the tables like the Galley oars in Ben Hur (Galley. Ha! I make joke, yes?) The long term effect of this will not be the nirvana businesses think.
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he operant term for working from home became "Zooming"
On what planet did that happen?
Was he right? (Score:2)
Crack smoking monkey (Score:3)
Guys who can't tell history right predicts future? (Score:2)
Given the severe lack of historical factual information his is 'Revenge of the Nerds' documentaries, we're supposed to believe he can predict the future of technology??
Shit - "Triumph of the Nerds", not revenge (Score:2)
It's too damn late - hope some of you got a chuckle out of it...
Why does "Cringe-y" even matter? (Score:4)
Seems like Slashdot covered some of these wildly incorrect Robert Cringely predictions not that long ago ... and it's no different this time around (complete with an anon poster summarizing the fiascos like the "Mineserver" stuff with this guy).
It's an interesting study to see how COVID and the rapid push to "work from home" changed the nature of I.T. But it didn't "kill" any of it.
What I saw (and still see in my current I.T. job) is that your "support" staff were forced to change roles to predominantly help desk type work over the phone and/or chat support online. That's just because at least temporarily, you shifted most people away from working in an office where I.T. support could just walk over to their desk to fix an issue. It didn't decrease the number of support issues though. It probably created more calls for assistance because the typical user now had to learn how to navigate VPN client connection errors/issues and identify when one was due to their ISP or home router, vs something on the other end (incorrect password or problems with the VPN gateway).
This whole thing about moving everything to "the cloud" is garbage too. That's a trend that's been going on for years now. But companies who went "all in" on the hype and made that change are starting to regret some of it and trying to pull back. Like someone else commented on here, the costs are a big factor. Most of these hosting plans start out attractively priced but your costs skyrocket as load on your production systems increase, or as storage needs increase. You also lose some control over everything. EG. If you run in-house development and production servers, you know if money gets tight, at least you can just keep on using the same hardware and software you always used. It'll work as well as it ever did as long as you're not running out of drive space or exceeding whatever limits it has. If it's all up in the cloud someplace, you have to keep paying that monthly subscription fee or else it all comes to a grinding halt. And the provider can raise the prices as soon as any contract you had with them runs out.
But all in all, I think most businesses are eager to bring people back into the offices as soon as this COVID scare winds down. They're counting down the number of days they've still got to put up with all of this because it creates some morale problems when your workforce doesn't get to interact with each other in person anymore. And you can provide a more consistent experience for the staff when they're all working from a fixed location. No more hassles if Jane has a relatively slow Internet connection or if Bob always has noisy dogs or kids in the background whenever people have conversations with him. Local servers on gigabit Ethernet in the office can transfer large files to and from the workstations so much more quickly than anyone can do from remote locations. Even the office furniture is likely better than what many people have set up at home.
He's just another tawt. (Score:2)
what a moron. (Score:1)
This guy doesn't know what IT even is. Even when he tries to come up with some lame specific definition of it he's still wrong.
First of all, IT departments are alive and well during the pandemic. People need to use a corporate ZOOM account across 9+ platforms. They need email. They need collaboration software. Chat. SSO. TLS traffic inspection. DLP. DRM. Desktop support. Domain profile sync. Virus scanning. And the old 'I forgot my password', 'I can't get on the VPN', etc.
And then there's ITSM: you know, th
I dodged that bullet (Score:2)
I'm an Old Sysadmin. Started with BSD in '89. Went to Sun OS 4.x in '90. Then to Solaris in '92 - 2000 or so. Linux after that. Retired in 2019, just in time.
When you're retired *EVERY* day is Saturday!
Started work a couple years ago towards my next career as an interfaith chaplain. Haven't settled just where I'll work next, but chances are there won't be an AI to replace me in a hospital room.
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Wow, I had no idea old sysadmins ever retired...I thought they just got crankier and crankier. ;)
When my last gig was winding down, I interviewed at a shop that had their own, bare metal data center. The sysadmin manager was looking for a "grey beard sysadmin" to show his staff how to work with the hardware. They asked me what I thought was my idea of a good day, and I told 'em it was a day in the data center. They looked at me like I was from Mars.
But then I interviewed with one of their millennial programmers. You know. Tatoos, face jewelry, hipster haircut. The whole works. He asked me if I
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Tough Love's prediction for 2021 (Score:2)
Robert Cringley will become more irrelevant than ever before.