The Computing Comedy

We have had this costly comedy going for more than 30 years and it keeps on getting better. After 15 years of laughing I am compelled to shed some light as to how it is made to be appealing for the many. Even those that think they know may end up just using it because of the promises.

The feather that tickles my funny bone is the term Cloud Computing! It has all the goodies that IT has been boasting for many years; Solutions Orientated, Large Value Proposition, Web 2.0, Attractive Cost/Benefit, Ease To Use, Certified and where the context of the implementation is the best for the customer.

The most famous proposition of Cloud Computing is Solutions Orientated Service where the maintenance, support and implementation services are administered closed-door by an army of administrators and IT engineers. They are so disconnected from the user that they have only one goal in mind and that is to keep the systems up at all cost. The framework as to how the cloud is designed to maintain its uptime is so poorly documented is the reason why the customer is locked-out. These administrators are constantly putting out fires every day resolving uptime issues when there is no real path for a single platform to be scalable simple enough to meet the promise of Cloud Computing. The cost further escalates with the incompetence’s and lack of foresight in the design is met.

Without saying that it is too expensive to maintain and that it will get more and more expensive with the exponential increase in data storage it is termed as a having a Large Value Proposition. Maintaining a full uptime storage system is exponentially increased during backup and maintenance services are conducted. Moving data to increase reliability increases the bandwidth requirements of any network. This leads to huge redundant data transfers that inhibit the usage of actual customer data transfers.

Web 2.0 sounds like software that will be automatically downloaded from the Internet that is already happening and I am loosing out. I just have to pay for it before I get to use it. The concept of Web 2.0 was already there at the birth of Internet. There is nothing to install but only the change is in it's usage. The founders of the internet had already envisioned all that is slowly being churned out as IT innovation today. However, they will be rolling in their jammies when they are perplexed with the cost of it all.

Customers are fooled to see the logic in Cost and Benefits analysis produced by a vendor that is selling an IT product, who does not have any clue of what real costs are. If the customer themselves has no clue of the real cost then how can the vendor even conjure a figure in reality.

I was told that to make it in live, One has to work hard. So I really loved the term Hard-to-Use systems. When Ease-To-Use systems came about which is what I hated, I felt stupid because now I can get a better live and work with fewer steps. As systems got easier to use, so they made it harder to get certified. Certification gave the impression that you are able to work when you were not told what was actually needed. That means you are certified to handle bull shit even before it is thrown at you.

Lastly, the idea of computing has misled us in many ways because it does not do the work for you. It does not hit the nail. It is a mere hammer that helps get the job done if every job is reduced to a nail. The task in IT is to reduce every problem to a nail and then apply the right hammer to suite that nail. But the nail is never hit until there is human intervention. 90% of IT professionals enjoy talking in jargon that tells you how to hit that nail or what hammer to use but the customer has to believe in the jargon before taking that plunge. 

If Apple Ipad could link very word we heard to a Wiki link then everyone will be on the same page hitting the nail right. Even if you are a slow reader the nail would have changed but you would be fitter to hit it well. Happy Computing.