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A spirited defense of waste
May 17, 2005
Computerworld columnist Frank Hayes has launched a personal attack on me in a bizarre rebuttal to my recent article "The End of Corporate Computing." He claims I wrote the piece to curry favor with IT vendors after alienating them with my earlier writings: "Carr seems to have learned something in two years: You don't get high-dollar consulting gigs by telling potential clients that their products and job functions don't matter." (For the record, I've never sought or performed any IT-related "consulting gigs," high dollar or low.)
As for my argument that we're beginning to shift from a private to a utility model of IT supply, Hayes claims that we need not bother thinking about utility computing because "utility computing is mature." He says that it reached its fulfillment back in the early 1960s when ADP was selling its payroll services and Ross Perot founded EDS. And as for the "miserably low capacity utilization" in corporate IT today, well, we don't have to worry about that, either, because Moore's Law means "that economies of scale are trivial." That's wrong, even if we assume, as Hayes seems to, that the trillion dollars a year companies spend on IT are all going into microchips. It's profoundly wrong if we consider the redundant expenditures on labor, software and services, not to mention the expense and distraction inherent in integrating incompatible systems and data.
Hayes goes on to argue that users demand fragmented, inefficient IT. Actually, users don't give a damn about the machinery of IT; they care about the information. Shifting to an efficient, flexible and cheaper utility model will in the end make it easier for them to get what they really want from computing - without the headaches of pouring money and time into private IT powerplants. In conclusion, Hayes says that "scattered, wasteful computing is the best generator of business advantage we've got." I'm speechless, so he gets the last word.
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Comments
If you're right (and you are), Frank Hayes doesn't have any more readers. I'm pretty sure you'll still have the last word here - because eventually he (and the rest of the IT trade press) won't have anybody left to read their pandering.
Posted by: Chris Selland at May 21, 2005 04:38 PM
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