Observations on the Techie World

Back in the 90's IT as a career was seen as a good option by students entering further and higher education this meant lots of qualified IT workers and happy days for the IT industry.

The proliferation of off shoring coupled with a general downturn in the market after 2000 however, put a lot of skilled IT people out of work and because they were quite skilled pretty intelligent people they either decided to do something else or simply went else where.

This short sited attitude to IT workers back then has given IT, as a career, a rather poor image, after all who wants to study a subject for years at university only to find all the jobs have gone to India when they graduate. This has lead to a massive downturn in the numbers on IT courses and has therefore lead to the situation we now find our selves in. Numbers going into IT courses has only just started to improve, so it will be years before we get greater numbers of IT graduates.

Now thats great for people like me who still managed to get work during the lean times and are now much in demand but is bad for industry as a whole. However I can't help thinking that short term profiteering by off shoring everything in site is a lot to blame for the situation. When CTOs realised that lots of their off shored projects were failing they decided to bring the work back in house and, oh dear, found there were no longer skilled workers left to do it. That situation has also now been compounded by a general upturn in the market.

People got stung pretty badly and it's going to take a long time for those memories to fade. IT is now no longer seen as a good career choice and as it takes so long to acquire the skills needed in this business the problem is not going to go away over night. This is compounded by the fact that much of the work still done in the UK is very highly skilled as most of the simpler stuff is still off shored. This makes entering the IT industry very difficult as you need a very high level of skill to fill even junior positions these days.

Now I'm not against off shoring all together but something should have been done several years ago to limit the number of jobs going off shore, therefore sustaining the IT industry in the UK. The consequences of this short sited 'gold rush' in the early part of this decade is going be felt for years to come.

The recent news stories about Microsoft and Open Source represent, at face value, a very odd turn of events for Microsoft as only a couple of years ago they dismissed open source as anti competitive and even anti American. This change of heart seems to represent more a change in the perception of open source as a commercial proposition than a willingness of Microsoft to embrace the open source community. Over the last couple of years open source has gathered pace with many innovations now coming from the open source community. Microsoft is bound to get pretty worried about this as they seem pretty low on new ideas themselves given that Vista just seems to be a rehash of much of whats already available in the open source environment, put together with a bit of Microsoft polish and a lot of slick marketing. Ultimately the biggest threat to Microsoft is from open source as any commercial organization can not hope to compete with the vast number of developers writing open source, some of which having proved themselves to be the best and most creative around.

Microsoft's biggest problem is that they can't stop open source because they can't buy it or force it out of business. This is why Microsoft don't detail possible patent infringements because if they did the community would either invalidate the patents with evidence of prior art or change the offending applications to circumvent the patent. After what happened to SCO the last thing Microsoft wants is to declare war on the open source community.

IBM has a much better philosophy of co-existence, which has brought many rewards to both sides. Microsoft would do better follow this example I think.

There has been a lot of media hype about the shiny little device with its touch screen but on close examination I think many people in the media have missed the point. Apple always said, right from the initial announcement of the device, that they wanted to redefine the mobile phone. Many commentators in the media seem to have interpreted this to mean that Apple was going for the smart phone market but I think this is just not the case.
Most smart phones are sold to corporate users who like to be able to access their exchange servers and applications while on the move but the iPhone does not have this functionality, at least not at the moment. Smart phones tend to be a bit over the top and complex for the average mobile user and don't really look all that good. I think what Apple have tried to do is make a smart phone for the masses. It's a device that gives an average user what they want, such as POP email access and a decent web browser. All this together with a very easy to use phone and a video iPod all in one device.
This is the real strength of the iPhone, not in the traditional smart phone market, but in the much larger fashion phone and high end tech toy market. I think apple have managed to redefine the mobile phone in that they have produced a device with smart phone features which is easy enough to be used by anyone and looks good enough to appeal to a more general mobile phone market.
In my opinion this is where the iPhones strengths lie and that is the potentially huge market sector they have gone for. Many commentators have said that there would be only a small market for a smart phone, but that is not what apple produced, they have instead produced a smart phone for the mass market, which does indeed reinvent the mobile phone, at least in some ways.