Zachmann.NET
The Road Ahead
The current economic turmoil creates an entirely new range of possibilities for developers who "get it" and acquire the knowledge and skills that are relevant for the road ahead.
In November 1995, Bill Gates published "The Road Ahead." It was a New York Times bestseller well into early 1996. Its success notwithstanding, the book barely mentioned the Internet and the Web. That was swiftly corrected in the second, greatly revised and extended edition less than a year later. Shift happens!
Today, at the end of 2008, as we look forward into 2009, there are even greater shifts and greater challenges on the road ahead of us -- not just in technology, but with the world economy. We're looking ahead to what most experienced observers are calling the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Chances are slim to none that it will not affect our lives as software designers and developers.
On first look, for most, that will be cause for concern -- and rightly so. Anyone whose memory extends back far enough to recall the "dot bust" at the start of 2000 and the unraveling of the Web 1.0 boom knows why: The number of IT jobs contracted sharply, putting many thousands of programmers and developers out of work. It wasn't pretty.
It isn't likely to be pretty this time, either. The recent credit crunch and looming financial crisis are not expected to result in increased demand for software developers. Times are likely to be hard for many, possibly even harder than they were seven or eight years ago. This time, however, the problem will not be so narrowly focused on IT -- it will spread across most sectors of the economy.
Therein lies the first glimmer of hope for those who are involved with software development. The enormous expansion in Internet use and of the Web in the late 1990s was predominantly a consumer phenomenon. Serious business use of the Internet and the Web was extremely limited right up to the end of the 20th century.
It was not until the early 1990s, 10 years after the introduction of the IBM personal computer, that PC use in organizations really began to have an impact on how large-scale enterprise information systems were built and deployed. And it was not until the early part of this decade -- after the dot bust -- that serious business began to be done over the Internet and via the Web. We're still in the very early stages of that.
Challenge and Opportunity
In retrospect, the collapse of the initial wave of over-hyped speculative excess in 2000 can be seen to have been more about shaking off initial misconceptions about the Web on the road to getting serious about using them to do business. It marked the collapse of shortsighted business models built around "if you build it, they will come." Gone were destination sites with big ideas and no real business plan. It marked the beginning of understanding how to actually make money over the Internet -- and of how the Internet can be used for serious business systems as well.
SOAP, XML, .NET, RPC over HTTPS and much more were unknown to the world at large at the time of the dot bust. Since then, these and related technologies have built the foundations for an entirely new generation of information systems for business. They have paved the road to what is now emerging as "cloud computing" and a new world of worldwide interconnected systems that are yet to be built.
It is precisely here that the current situation of economic turmoil creates an entirely new range of possibilities for developers who "get it" and acquire the knowledge and skills that are relevant for the road ahead. Sure, there may be some hard times ahead of us, but there are also fantastic opportunities for those who are able to change with the changing times and technologies, and to build systems that can enhance productivity and build new business models.
Building for the Future
Now, more than ever, it will be crucial for business organizations to find new ways to leverage the ability to get work done by connecting people electronically rather than just physically or even organizationally. A new generation of information systems will need to be built, systems that fully take advantage of the ability to connect people across geographical and current organizational boundaries.
Far more than is generally realized, periods of economic dislocation are also periods of re-adjustment as emerging technology alters the structure of the economic framework. To succeed, businesses and governments must change the way they work. The current wave of change is very much about the impact of emerging information technology on the way we must do our business -- and the way that we will live our lives, as well.
So as we look forward to 2009, we should temper our fear and trepidation and keep a keen eye toward the opportunities on the road ahead of us: opportunities to build new information systems for the 21st century.
About the Author
William F. Zachmann, born before the modern digital computer was invented, has lived with them (and made his living off of them) all his life. He was director of research for The Forum Corp. in the mid-'70s and senior vice president of corporate research at International Data Corp. (IDC) in the '80s. He has a copy of Windows 1.0 that Bill Gates signed for him the night it was rolled out at Comdex Fall '85. Zachmann is now director of Canopus Research Inc. He programs in C# using Visual Studio 2005 with a focus on ASP.NET and SQL Server 2005.