“Bricks” and Pagers
We laugh at 1980’s “brick” phones, forgetting what a status symbol one was at the time. Only a fraction of the population could afford mobile phones back then. And now everyone carries a slick touch-screen computer in his/her pocket — more powerful than multiple rooms of 1980s mainframe equipment.
Despite all of the amazing advances in consumer technology: mobile gadgets, social networks, smart homes, smart cars, and many more, business software i.e. the systems one logs in upon coming to the office, has been stagnating for 20 years. Corporate IT is still in the “brick” era. Rewriting some of its software in “modern” languages (when it worked), changed nothing, as it is still based on 1970s mainframe architectures.
A “brick” is a “brick” — even fitted with a touchscreen display. What makes it a “brick”? Not the size. The price. Something that still costs a fortune (in customization and support fees for enterprise software) decades after its invention is… well, a “brick”. Something that barely performs: breaks after even simplest new functionality, if not just a bugfix, that creates five other bugs… Mainframe-conceived architectures can no longer handle the exponentially increasing business process complexity.
Technology stagnation affects everyone — primarily smaller companies that cannot afford “bricks”. The only affordable mobile communication solution of that era was little pagers. That’s what SMBs use today — little beepers of enterprise software: spreadsheets, simple accounting programs, cheap CRMs, and the rest of primitive form-filling apps. Many e.g. Zoho’s are free. Does little to make them useful. The user still has to copy-paste data between lots of them.
How it was possible for the consumer technology e.g.mobile phones and other gadgets to evolve that much, and still stay affordable? The same way Ford made cars affordable. It is the technical inventions themselves that make products orders of magnitude better and drastically reduce costs. It’s automation: the essence of technical progress — eliminating expensive manual labor and reducing the number of moving parts.
We can only speculate why it didn’t happen in enterprise software. Because it was “outsourced”? Wages slashed in half, forcing all inventors to consumer tech companies like Google, that still pay well. Because “manual labor” is a big business for the Great IT Consulting Food Chain, that only cares about man-hours instead of the results? IT departments have been coping with the 70% failure rate for decades, using those failures as a tax-hedging money sink for the parent corporate entity. Because it doesn’t matter what to hype in the Silicon Valley? Since it doesn’t need working products either — only “scientific” vaporware to “exit” with.
I hate to philosophize, but as the technical progress is driven by the shortage of labor and desire to do more with less workers, the abundance of (barely skilled) workers in the certain overpopulated part of the world supplying most of American corporate IT workforce today, must… yes, lead to the halt and worse, reversal of the technical progress.
I am not going to argue, “consulting” and other headcount fraud is profitable, as far, as MBAs (and Wall Street) are concerned. It’s lots of easy money — made out of thin air. Nothing’s wrong with it? Everyone is taking their cuts: from Oracle shareholders down to some solo “enterprise architect” selling 5y.o. coloring book worthy diagrams of databases, servers, and message queues to the clueless non-technical C-level audience. If someone’s willing to pay (by the hour) to listen to the most generic “technical” advice, sure…
It wastes the Earth resources and doesn’t move the civilization forward. That’s what’s wrong. Nothing’s been done since Y2K. Fortune 100 corporations still struggle with their 70–90% IT failures ($100M “brick” ERPs), while smaller companies suffocate w/o mission-critical all-in-one systems of ERP caliber.
The majority of small companies is in the information business: mortgage brokers, law offices, insurance agents, medical staff, and many others. They have the same automation requirements, as large corporations. Small businesses desperately need adequate enterprise software — mission critical systems covering all business functionality, not little productivity apps here and there.
SMBs need reliability, security, and performance — everything we associate with solid enterprise software. Plus they need things not commonly found in old school enterprise offerings e.g. intuitive UI similar to consumer websites and mobile apps. But most importantly, any user needs one place to go without the need to convert files from one format to another or copy-paste. There has to be a more productive way to use a computer, than switching between spreadsheets and primitive form-filling applications — zip-tied and duct-taped together by some local “computer guy”.
Sadly all attempts to adapt “bricks” for small companies have failed. SMBs don’t have IT departments and cannot afford even the leanest team of uhm… five cheapest ($25/hr) Salesforce consultants. They shouldn’t. Steam locomotives didn’t evolve into better ones. They vanished like “brick” phones, making way to a radically new technology. The MBA’s solution: making “bricks” cheaper (through “offshore” labor) is not what modern information-centric businesses need. Both Fortune 100 and SMBs need the engineer’s solution: slick, elegant, and powerful “smartphones” of the enterprise software.
It is 2018. Why companies need to choose between “bricks” and “pagers” of business software? The technology is here — the same advances in Computer Science that back all recent consumer innovations: from social networks to mobile apps. Everything is in place: programming languages, frameworks, advanced Cloud infrastructure — free (open-source) or sold for pennies.
What’s missing? What was “outsourced”? Engineers willing to use state of the art tools to fight enterprise automation complexity. And technology visionaries to lead engineers into that battle. Will they come from Google or Netflix? No, those are consumer companies, obsessed with data science. Will they come from IBM, Oracle, or Deloitte? A rhetorical question — that’s the man-hour world.
It is you, underpaid and abused programmer, who needs to pick up the torch. Do you still believe, after seeing all of the languages, frameworks, and toolkits, that came from Google and Amazon, that a single programmer’s output is limited to blogs, messengers, brochure websites, and other single-purpose products? Do you believe only a big corporation like Intuit can develop a scaled down accounting ERP like QuickBooks? How about $100M SAP and Oracle ERPs? Why the f… not?
Challenge Oracle like it challenged IBM in the 70s — and won. Then (technologically) lost to Salesforce, that challenged it 20 years later. Both were 3–4-people teams when they started. Today it can be a single programmer. No one needs a crude single-table CRM Salesforce started with, but if it can be built today in four hours by a single developer, you can certainly spend a few months developing something that used to be Oracle and SAP monopoly.
