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In My Opinion....... A Parable of the Modern Networking Industry In the beginning, there was the mainframe. And the mainframe begat the supermini. And the supermini begat the minicomputer. And……and then the Great God Of Centralised Computing turned his back “just for a second, honest!” and that little upstart Intel snuck in the back door. At first, the Great God was angry and cried “Lo! I shall unleash a plague upon you of the like of which you have never witnessed before. Your hardware shall stutter and fail, and your software shall run like the proverbial snail, mate. Behold the plague – it is called Microsoft!” And the Great God laughed, and his disciples mocked the followers of Wintel, as the New God became known. But Wintel flourished and his followers grew in number and the Once-Great God was diminished in the eyes of his disciples and retired to lick his wounds…..and bide his time. For this could never last. Meanwhile, the New God Wintel promised the total banishment of the Great God, sacrificed at the Alter Of Distributed Computing. But no matter how hard he tried, and no matter how many terabytes of disk storage and gigabytes of RAM he consumed in the process, he could never quite deliver on that promise. Years passed, and Wintel’s followers began to reflect longingly on the Good Old Days. Days when management was simple and when all their data was in one place. “We want easy access to our data” they cried. And the priests of the New God – the Independent Software Vendors (ISV) – realised that the Great God Of Centralised Computing was never going to disappear. In fact, his following was gaining in numbers once again. And cowering around the back of the Great God’s throne, the Lesser Gods Of The Minicomputers were also still hanging on in there. On the fringe were the crazies, the disillusioned, those who were free of spirit and mind, and they set about doing things in a completely different way to everyone else. Yet even these Disciples Of The Small Demon – these lentil-eating Macintosh Users – created useful data that must be accessed by Those Who Are More Enlightened, and required access to data created by others. So the priests of Wintel came up with a solution. “Lo! We bring an end to the great plague”, they cried. “We bring you the solution for which you have all been longing. We bring you the means to pull together all your data from every piece of hardware in your temple. We bring you a single, unified client that will run on any platform and present all your data – no matter where it may be stored – in a user-friendly and accessible manner”. “We bring you…..The Corporate Portal!” And the followers rejoiced, for they believed the learned priests when they told them that this new religion was the answer to all their prayers. They embraced the new religion and began to build new temples, for surely the priests would lead them on the path that was right and pure? Surely those priests were not inventing new religions just to boost flagging congregations and fill the collecting plate? Surely the priests only have our best interests at heart? And so we filled the collecting plates and adopted the new religion, incorporating it into our daily lives. We felt secure, because as we listened carefully to the prayers and incantations of the priests we detected the Word Of Truth. The Word that meant we were following the One True Path Of Enlightenment – The Word was Internet. Outside the temples were those with much money to fill the collecting plates, but not enough imagination to create a religion of their own. They heard The Word and rushed to put money into the collecting plates in exchange for a piece of the action. The priests agreed eagerly. Yet rather than use the money to build anything of substance, they simply frittered it spreading The Word to more and more people. The money quickly exhausted, the priests returned to the money lenders repeating The Word Of Truth over and over again – Internet, Internet, Internet – like a mantra. Trance-like, the moneylenders poured money into the collecting plates, only to see it quickly disappear once again. To an outsider, the religion may appear to have no substance. The priests are great orators, however, and since they have built their religion on the promise of The Word, then how can it possibly fail? Deep in debt and with nothing tangible to show for it, the religion nevertheless attracts a huge following. The New God has been watching closely and thinks to himself “this is indeed a mighty idea”. The followers it has attracted will make a useful addition to the New God’s flock, and so he approaches the priests and makes them an offer they cannot refuse. No sooner is the money in the bank, than the priests exercise their options and take advantage of the exit clause. The religion is finally subsumed completely by the New God, all pretence of originality and promise of a New Beginning forgotten forever. It seems no one wants to build a religion to rival that of the New God anymore. Priests come and go, but the aim is always the same – attract the money lenders and build a religion to the point where it is swallowed by one of the Gods, then exit with the money from the collecting plates. Is this really good for the World Of Computing? I am beginning to wonder if we will ever again witness the rise of a solid religion built on more than empty promises, with the power to fill its own collecting plates by virtue of what it produces rather then selling to the Gods. A religion that will one day rival the New God and create a new force in the World. It would be nice to be given the chance to dance to a different tune every now and then, wouldn’t it?�
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