June 6th, 2005
Some of the biggest problems facing us techies as the second wave of high-tech growth begins are strictly emotional.
There are a lot of investors out there who lost their shirts in the 1990s paying for gigantic TVs in the boardrooms or reception areas, ping-pong tables in lunch rooms, trips kayaking up Indian Arm or some other suitably non-high-tech modes of transportation to non-high-tech destinations ... in short, these people watched a lot of other people have fun with their money while ostensibly creating the next greatest piece of vapourware that would eventually be a product the world wouldn't be able to live without. Feh ... a lot of spoiled people wasted a lot other (somewhat gullible) folks' money.
So now that there is a second wave starting, people talk about "insight" and "vision" and "conservatism" that apparently didn't exist in the 1990s for the most part. But those terms are really just a series of adjectives that eventually boil down to "caution". Something that should have been employed a decade ago, but a concept that people with money to invest just couldn't quite grasp in their emotionally-charged state of greed.
(By the way, it's hard to blame the idiot-savant 20-nothings of the 90s for taking the money for their start-ups; heck, if it was there, they might as well have. Someone else would have if they hadn't.)
So caution will be a facet of the growth in high-tech (or, more specifically, IT, I suppose) in the next few years. That's a problem for us techies because it will inhibit the kind of uncontrollable, unsustainable growth we saw in the 1990s. Now, I personally didn't get rich, but a few of my friends did. The second time through, there just won't be that many foolish venture capitalists around to let that sort of thing happen.
But let's think about the state of software itself, shall we? In the 1990s, operating systems promised much more than they ever delivered. Unless you were one of those perverse self-flagellating DOS or Unix types, you could only point and click at stuff that did little, and took forever doing it. All was in its infancy. There were few software applications (we called them "programs", remember?) that performed more than 1/4 of the tasks we asked of them. Oh sure, we could see the point and the advantage—and we could sure as hell see how they would benefit us ever more and more in the future—but there were a lot of big tasks that we still couldn't perform using software, or at least couldn't perform well.
But, 10 years later, we have word processors that compress and email documents. We have standardized formats that are becoming accepted industry-wide. We have operating systems that don't crash every time we click certain icons in sequence. Data warehousing was first made possible and is now working according to our dreams of the 1980s. I have proof of this in my email and snail mail box daily. Negotiate a mortgage with one bank and get crud flying your way from three other banks for the next few weeks. And we have software that has evolved not based on theoretical designs somebody pulled out of his/her ass after a week of seclusion and sleep deprivation, but designed painfully and slowly over months and years by users' agony over fighting with well-meaning but poorly-designed software.
And, quite frankly, we now have software that is mature. It's mature enough to be useful without our having to wait for the latest and greatest. If you think that I am lacking in imagination, one only has to look at the length of time between major releases of big popular software products these days. Aside from service packs and "hot fixes", the next greatest thing entails smaller and smaller details, and smaller and smaller audiences to benefit from those new features.
Software reached some point of critical mass while we weren't looking, and now we build applications that are useful and reliable ... in short, they are mature.
Gone are the days when we looked at new software from new companies we'd never heard of and thought (or sometimes said aloud), "Wow ... this is big!" They are replaced by a more mature set of thoughts: "This is a good idea for those people who need to do X." Or: "I could foresee a time when this may be helpful to me if I ever needed to do Y." See? Software has become the former super-group that plays unplugged at the local live-theatre instead of selling out (then blowing out) the stadium downtown.
So another facet of the new growth in high-tech (or at least in IT) is maturity. But let's think about the repercussions to the oral-chicken-beheaders among us: It means that the enthusiasm that drove a lot of innovation (and the mania that drove the stupidity) has evaporated, leaving an older set of folks making the software. We were in our twenties a decade ago, so now we're in our thirties. You know what that means? Much fewer all-nighters. Our girlfriends and boyfriends are now our spouses, and will be wanting to know when they can expect us home. We may have children which will suddenly take precedence over making that ship-date that managers used to decree without really understanding the concept of "schedule". (And they saw with some surprise that their schedules were met because folks didn't mind working 100 hour weeks to make them—those days are definitely gone!)
Oh yes, much has changed. When you are pushing 40, you suddenly realise that you could squander your entire life on software if you wanted to ... and when you were done you still wouldn't have anything tangible to show for it. When you cut code or write reams of manuals or write your 10,000th test case, you begin to realise that more of the same isn't going to bring your hair back to the top of your head (or turn the white ones that are still there back into brown). The slowly atrophying muscles in your backside are a pretty loud indicator of the hours cutting code for something that needs your work less and less, since it's already become a mature enough product and people are going to be slow to buy or back it anyway.
In short, you are exercising moderation. A little judgment never hurt, eh? And I think if there is one thing that this ridiculous society of ours is lacking, it is moderation. We know all about excess ... good grief, we have positively made it into an art form. But moderation will be the only thing to save us ... if, in fact, we can still be saved.
The high-tech (software) surge of the aughts will be differentiated from the orgiastic pleasure-seeking explosion of the "work-hard, play hard" imbecilic 90s because people are, by and large, a decade older. Just as we can't party all night and work all day any more, we can't work all month and party all the next like we used to, either. We have no choice but to show some moderation in what we do, and that will have a trickle-down effect over all aspects of the high tech businesses.
So, just as I said, the limits ... the challenges to future development in high tech business are strictly emotional: Caution will reign supreme because enough people will have been financially burned in the past; an air of maturity will have descended over the players because of a maturity in the computer software we develop; and, finally, from that maturity will rise an environment of moderation.
There will almost definitely be another high-tech upswing, but it won't be the wild money-greased stupid ride it was the last time around.
So, as a final thought, let's hope that one other facet of high-tech businesses of the 1990s doesn't make a come back: The vicious and willful destruction of the English language. "Empowerment", "architecting", "low-hanging fruit", "leveraging", "extreme programming", "tasking" ... ugh! Enough already! People in the 1980s eventually realised how stupid their hair and clothes looked ... can't you word-weasels wake up and listen to how stupid you sound? We'll all feel a lot better for it.
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