Last time I tried to shift my paradigm, the gears began to grind--maybe
I need some paradigm fluid. 

But seriously: 
This bodes well for some of us.  The old-style "centralized" programmers
should be in the pink, unless, the trend of exporting manufacturing jobs
bleeds over to the information services world.  Already some companies
are doing large scale data entry in third-world countries.  Several
airlines process their outsource 'paper' ticket processing to a
companies in the Caribbean (The Bahamas and Haiti, I think but I'm not
entirely sure).  I don't begrudge these workers their jobs, but I worry
when it threatens mine.
I have worked with companies that import coders from India and Russia at
a fraction of the wages they would make as a resident of the US. They
were making $8/hr plus enough living expenses to share an apartment with
3 other imported programmers.  This was my first 'real' programming job
and I started at $20/hr. It wasn't fair to the Indians and Russians to
make so little, nor the Americans that could have been hired in their
stead.  For those outside the US, $8/hr is just barely over our
established poverty level. BTW, they were great programmers and I
learned a lot working with them.  

What happens if the ability to outsource information processing extends
overseas?

Just my 2¢.  

Don't flame too badly.  

Scott

> ----------
> From:         Wirt Atmar[SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent:         Wednesday, May 19, 1999 2:57PM
> Subject:      The paradigm shift that few people are talking about
> 
> There's a longish, well-reasoned article in today's NY Times entitled,
> "Internet Fuels Revival of Centralized 'Big Iron' Computing". The
> article is
> at:
> 
>  
> http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/05/biztech/articles/19net.html
> 
> "Well-reasoned" in this context means that the ideas that the article
> portrays are in fundamental agreement with the conclusions that I've
> come to,
> too :-). When we last discussed this topic about a year ago, I
> entitled the
> subject line something like, "The death of the PC," and because of
> that, the
> discussion went off on a tangent, arguing strenuously that PCs weren't
> dead,
> nor were they anywhere near so.
> 
> I remember being too busy to reply at length at the time, but I
> totally
> agree. PC's aren't going anywhere, but their role is changing
> dramatically.
> Indeed, what's going on now is more of a paradigm shift than any of
> the
> preceeding, pre-announced "paradigm shifts." What's changing about the
> PC is
> that it's going to become a very bright and pretty terminal -- that
> has the
> capability to run local wordprocessing and spreadsheet programs if
> desired --
> but that's about it.
> 
> The era of large, near-mainframe-like PCs mounted on everyone's desk
> is
> probably already over. Maintaining 500, or 5,000, or 50,000 of these
> devices
> is an extraordinary expense. Over the last 25 years we've gone through
> a
> number of "paradigms": peer-to-peer networking, cooperative computing,
> distributed computing, complex client/server, thin client/server  --
> but
> where we're headed is right back where we started 35 years ago: a
> central
> host surrounded by relatively simple, relatively cheap terminals. It
> is the
> only model that is simple enough and efficient enough and easy enough
> to
> maintain, particularly so on a large scale.
> 
> What I meant to emphasize in my earlier posting a year ago was that
> the PC,
> as it has been traditionally used for the last 10 years, is quite
> clearly
> dying. And at the same time, it will proliferate everywhere,
> especially now
> that it has become cheap. And in the process, applications are going
> to move
> off of the PC and back on the central hosts.
> 
> The NY Times article comes to the same conclusion:
> 
> "But Gates also warned of the rising threat to some Microsoft products
> likely to come from online services. "A company such as America Online
> is in competition for all our information-management software, because
> they can do it through their servers," he observed.
> 
> "In Silicon Valley, dozens of start-ups have been created as Internet
> services to centrally handle personal information. The new companies
> mostly focus on e-mail, calendars and back-up file storage to insure
> information is not lost when an individual's PC crashes.
> 
> "Many of these applications should be moved onto the Internet because
> it
> is more reliable, available everywhere and cheaper," said Eric Brewer,
> a
> University of California at Berkeley computer scientist who is a
> co-founder of Inktomi Corp., a Web software company."
> 
> Several people have asked about the Financials/Payroll package that I
> announced a year ago, when Cort more or less abandoned the HP3000.
> We're
> still working on it, but after just a bit of thought a year ago, it
> became
> obvious that once we fully develop it, we shouldn't sell it. Rather,
> the
> obvious way to market it now is not to an installed base of HP3000
> users,
> which is a fairly constrained population, but rather to the world at
> large,
> hosting the applications package here locally on our HP3000s and
> letting
> anyone, anywhere run the software from their PCs, using a new and more
> attractive version of QCTerm that is also currently in development.
> 
> This is exactly the same conclusion that Microsoft has come to
> independently
> regarding their next generation of products. You're not going to
> purchase
> them. Rather, you're going to pay for them as you use them, over the
> internet.
> 
> The second piece of the NY Times article that struck a particularly
> resonant
> bell was the section on the death, or at least substantial
> diminishment, of
> the DP department, a subject I also profoundly agree with, but have
> been a
> little timid to mention. They write:
> 
> For all the attention understandably focused on the meteoric rise of
> online
> retailers and auctioneers, like Amazon and Ebay, the biggest economic
> impact of the Internet in the next few years is expected to be inside
> old-line companies like Goodyear -- boosting productivity by
> electronically automating back-office transactions.
> 
> Though Goodyear has an in-house datacenter, it chose to let outside
> experts provide the computing power for its Web site -- a role known
> as
> hosting -- and run its electronic commerce network. Many companies
> are making the same choice. That is why the Web hosting business of
> both established companies like IBM and AT&T, and newcomers like
> Exodus Communications Inc. and Verio Inc., is projected to grow from
> $696 million last year to $10.7 billion in 2002, according to
> International
> Data Corp., a research firm.
> 
> Internet companies like America Online, to be sure, will have their
> own
> server farms. But others increasingly view computing as a utility, a
> service
> to be purchased like electricity. Indeed, technology historians note
> that
> when factories began using electricity in the late 19th century, each
> had
> its own power plant. Later, regional utilities were created and sold
> electric service to the factories.
> 
> At Goodyear, Hargreaves seemed to apply the same logic to his
> company's decision to have its Web site for dealers managed by IBM at
> its server farm in Schaumburg. "We're in the tire business," he
> explained.
> "Why run the digital power plant ourselves?"
> 
> Again, where we're headed is right back where we started, with
> centrally-located time-sharing services. The only difference is that
> 30 years
> ago, telephone charges made computing over any distance
> extraordinarily
> expensive. In that, the internet changes everything, and outsourcing
> information management is likely to become an exceptionally common
> process,
> particularly so for businesses with 10 to 1000 employees. There are
> 10's of
> thousands of these kinds of companies in the US alone -- and for the
> most
> part -- they don't want to run their "digital power plants" either.
> 
> The world's changing. And there's going to develop over the next five
> years
> an enormous opportunity for the establishment of centralized clusters
> of
> highly reliable commercial database engines.
> 
> Wirt Atmar
>