In Germany, politicians are fighting over whether to allow tens of thousands of foreign programmers into the country in the face of a shortfall of IT professionals. Left-wing trade unions and right-wing anti-immigration politicians are lobbying against letting in the foreign IT workers, most of whom would probably come from India.
The biggest piece of bunk that pundits were peddling in the wake of Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's Microsoft Corp. verdict was the idea that the decision simply wouldn't have any immediate impact. That notion didn't last long. Inside of 24 hours, the Dow and Nasdaq had dropped 500 points each. By last Wednesday, Microsoft's stock had lost 20 percent of its value and was still drifting lower. Wall Street analysts were saying Microsoft had finally burst the tech-stock bubble.
The end of the world is back again. Hey, I know I've missed it these past few months. Once Y2K turned out not to be a global disaster - thank you, IT people everywhere! - it was back to the same old life-goes-on grind. But now Bill Joy, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, is afraid that robotics, genetic engineering and nano-technology could destroy humanity in our lifetime.
It's another failing report card for IT. Last week, Boston Consulting Group Inc. released a study that says, in effect, we're butchering our enterprise projects. You know the ones: ERP and customer relationship management, supply chains and e-commerce. Two-thirds of our big projects were pegged as unsuccessful overall. That's despite the fact that more than 40 percent finished on time and on budget and that 60 percent of the executives who signed off on the projects said they were worth the cost.
Face it: for most of us, users are mainly an annoyance when we're building systems. They don't understand the technology. They don't like it when they get what they asked for. They're always changing the requirements and demanding the inelegant, the hard to design, the impossible to code.
Why risk it?
Japan's defence agency has pulled the plug on a new network linking army bases, after discovering that the software was written by members of a doomsday cult. Scary, huh? It gets scarier: five contract software companies run by members of the Aum Shinri Kyo ("supreme truth") cult also wrote code for government agencies overseeing education, construction, the post office and the telephone system - as well as for hundreds of corporate customers.
A reader writes: "I just read your column entitled ‘Hell hath no fury ...' I get the impression from your article that I should let the users define and possibly dig their own hole when it comes to [redesigning unusable applications]. That would defeat my purpose in (IT) life. One of my biggest challenges in this field is to help users interpret their requests into functional computer software. It's far easier to give them exactly what they want and then put the blame back on them. I prefer to guide them as much as I can so that we as a company develop software that makes everybody's life easier and helps the bottom line."
Japan's defense agency pulled the plug this week on a new network linking army bases, after discovering that the software was written by members of a doomsday cult. Scary, huh? It gets scarier: Five contract software companies run by members of the Aum Shinri Kyo ("supreme truth") cult also wrote code for government agencies overseeing education, construc- tion, the post office and the telephone system - as well as for hundreds of corporate customers.
Microsoft is finally getting out of the Java business. And that's good news. Really. For Microsoft, for Sun Microsystems and most of all for corporate IT shops. According to Microsoft's product road maps, its Visual J++ development tool isn't being upgraded with new versions of Java. And around the time the next major version of Visual J++ is due out - best guess now is spring of next year - Microsoft's lawsuit-plagued Java license from Sun will expire.
Want to hear something crazy? Forrester Research says the IT shop will be killed off in three years, its functions absorbed by outsourcers or the business departments currently served by corporate IT. Want to hear something even crazier? One reporter told me that for Computerworld's upcoming Premier 100 feature, he asked IT chiefs what they thought of getting top corporate management - we're talking CEO and board level here - involved in picking technology and vendors. Roughly half the IT bosses thought it was the right approach. The other half bristled at the very idea.
It's official: This Tuesday, Virginia's general assembly became the first state legislature in the U.S. to pass the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA). That's the law that makes shrink-wrapped software licenses legally binding. The votes came just days after an internal Microsoft memo surfaced, stating that 63,000 "potential known defects" - bugs, design problems, you name it - are still unfixed in the shipping version of Windows 2000.
Want to hear something crazy? Forrester Research says the IT shop will be killed off in three years, its functions absorbed by outsourcers or the business departments currently served by corporate IT. Want to hear something even crazier? One reporter told me that for Computerworld's upcoming Premier 100 feature, he asked IT chiefs what they thought of getting top corporate management - we're talking CEO and board level here - involved in picking technology and vendors. Roughly half the IT bosses thought it was the right approach. The other half bristled at the very idea.
Let users help you fix that dreaded screen
Let's cut to the chase here: what makes a winner? Who's going to be the next Microsoft, the next Netscape, the next Palm Computing? We want to know because the winners will be the companies that define the next generation or two of information technology. If you can spot what makes a winner, you've got a front-row ticket to the future of IT.