We are now at 25% of the way through C21. Most of C21 IT today is “kayfabe”: deliberately fake, to fool the audience.
SaaS: fake corporate IT services for company directors too cheap to hire competent IT staff.
The lie: it’s OK and safe to let other companies run your IT for you.
The truth: if it matters, own it, run it yourself.
Public cloud: it’s cheaper to leave your server hosting up to specialists. The lie: no it isn’t, but worse, you lose control of core key assets. The truth: you only need this for your public website, if that.
Kubernetes: you, yes you, you could be the next viral success and you need a website that scales to 10 million visitors a second. The lie: you need a microservices cluster
Javascript: now at last the dream of “write once run anywhere” is real! Everything is a web app!
The truth: all your “local” apps have a separate 200MB dependency on an old insecure copy of Chromium. How do you update them all? You don’t. You can’t. Your web apps depend on leftpad, that one dude in Nebraska from Xkcd 2347.
And of course…
AI. Computers that write their own software! Yay!
Only they don’t. It’s the emperor’s new clothes. Everyone believes it. It’s like religion: it is unacceptably rude to tell someone their god doesn’t exist. Even if the “god in the machine” is a language model.
It’s all fake all the way down. I think the last time the industry knew what it was doing was in the 20th century. Since the dotcom boom and bust, MBAs have just been winging it and hoping they don’t get called out ’til their shares vest.
He’s right, though.
We are now at 25% of the way through C21. Most of C21 IT today is “kayfabe”: deliberately fake, to fool the audience.
SaaS: fake corporate IT services for company directors too cheap to hire competent IT staff.
The lie: it’s OK and safe to let other companies run your IT for you.
The truth: if it matters, own it, run it yourself.
Public cloud: it’s cheaper to leave your server hosting up to specialists. The lie: no it isn’t, but worse, you lose control of core key assets. The truth: you only need this for your public website, if that.
Kubernetes: you, yes you, you could be the next viral success and you need a website that scales to 10 million visitors a second. The lie: you need a microservices cluster
Citation: https://DoINeedKubernetes.com/
Javascript: now at last the dream of “write once run anywhere” is real! Everything is a web app!
The truth: all your “local” apps have a separate 200MB dependency on an old insecure copy of Chromium. How do you update them all? You don’t. You can’t. Your web apps depend on leftpad, that one dude in Nebraska from Xkcd 2347.
And of course…
AI. Computers that write their own software! Yay!
Only they don’t. It’s the emperor’s new clothes. Everyone believes it. It’s like religion: it is unacceptably rude to tell someone their god doesn’t exist. Even if the “god in the machine” is a language model.
It’s all fake all the way down. I think the last time the industry knew what it was doing was in the 20th century. Since the dotcom boom and bust, MBAs have just been winging it and hoping they don’t get called out ’til their shares vest.