Something's happening

There’s something happening here

What it is ain’t exactly clear

There’s a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware

I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down

Stephen Stills: For What It’s Worth: Buffalo Springfield: 1967

Do you know?
Don’t you wonder?
What’s going on
Down under you

David Crosby: Déjà vu: Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, 1969

It’s been a long time coming. [Okay, okay, enough of the CSNYisms. But I make no apology. After all, I have consistently confessed that the Dead, particularly people like Jerry Garcia and John Perry Barlow, taught me more about open source than anyone else since.]

Fast forward from the Sixties. Enter the early Eighties.

1980-81. A heady time for the IT industry. The manufacturing-led crises of the Seventies were behind us. The software revolution was under way; people who shifted tin were beginning to realise that there was more value to be created, more money to be made, in the stuff that used to be given away for free. On 6 November 1980, as part of Project Chess, IBM signed contracts with Microsoft: the world’s biggest IT company set sail on a course that would create its replacement, the world’s biggest IT company.

The next two decades saw some incredible growth in the sector, as we learnt about personal computing, open systems, the internet and the Web.

And with the growth came paranoia. There’s something happening here/What it is ain’t exactly clear. The PC revolution meant that the erstwhile Data Processing and Management Information Systems department were being disintermediated, with some unintended consequences. The client-server paradigm was upon us, despite its uglinesses and inefficiencies. And the IT department was born.

In the middle of all that, under the shadow of the crash of ’87, there were some voices questioning what was happening. I was particularly taken with Paul Strassmann’s The Business Value of Computers, published in 1990.

The thrust of the book was simple. Throwing money at IT did not make your company profitable, you had to know what you were doing. And there were many pitfalls, often designed by the industry itself.

The late 1990s were another heady period, as Microsoft, like IBM before them, created the environment from which the world’s largest IT companies would emerge, by making sure that everything that stayed still was painted Windows, and everything that moved saluted Internet Explorer. Google took that, augmented it in the context of what Tim Berners Lee had let loose on top of the internet, made use of what Linus Torvalds and gang had done, and the rest was history.

Unparalled growth again.

And with the growth came paranoia. There’s something happening here/What it is ain’t exactly clear. The Web revolution meant that the IT department needed to morph again; decentralisation and web services were the order of the day.

And in the middle of all that, under the shadow of the crash of 2000-01, again, voices emerged questioning the value of IT. This time it was Nicholas Carr. But the message was the same. You can’t throw money at IT and expect value creation. You needed to know what you were doing.

Immense value was being generated, but not enough of it was reaching the customer. Some of it was being wasted, some of it was being siphoned off,  and only a small portion was making it all the way to the customer.

But I put all this into a conceptual framework that made sense to me.

The manufacturing-led downturn of the 1970s led to a commoditisation of hardware, and software became more important.

The services-led downturn of the 1980s led to a commoditisation of software, and services became more important.

The internet-bubble-led downturn of 2000-01 led to a new form of commoditisation: connectivity and mobility became standard and affordable, and in turn were augmented by cheap storage and ever-increasing miniaturisation.

Many of the phenomena we see today rely on these successive commoditisations. Facebook would not be Facebook if there were no mobile phones, if there were no digital cameras in those phones, if there wasn’t ubiquitous connectivity. There would be no iPhone, no iTunes, no Amazon, no Google. Not even a Microsoft.

And yet.

And yet I still had this nagging feeling that there was something missing. That something radical had yet to take place in the industry I was part of.