Everything old is new again!

I just attended a Computerworld-sponsored conference SaaScon 2008 on software as a service, held in Santa Clara, CA.

The information technology ( IT) industry loves hypes — be they thin-clients, client-server computing, object-oriented databases, ASP, ISP, MSP, xSP, virtualization, Web x.0 (where x = 1, 2, or 3), mashups, cloud computing, social computing — which drive the industry, clients get excited, and the analysts and vendors work each other. The problem with us Americans is that we do not have an emphasis or focus on history, recent or otherwise.

Specific to this conference that focused on software-as-a-service (SaaS), it was amazing to see how many attendees were excited about the concept of SaaS. SaaS is nothing new: Thirty years ago they were called Service Bureaus (remember CDC’s Cybernet?) You submitted a job with punched cards to a computer that was housed who-knows-where, got the results back, fixed any errors, resubmitted your job, and got the final results after a few runs. This was real cloud computing: You had a dumb terminal (a.k.a. green screen), usually a 3270; a computer, usually a mainframe, and a network that you didn’t know what it consisted of. You probably had a TI Silent 700 terminal with thermal paper to input and print out the results, and not a desktop/laptop with lots of memory, disk space, GUI, and a wide-screen monitor. But, you got your work done, although it probably took you longer than it would today.

So, is SaaS going to take over the world? No, but it will play an increasingly significant role. Many defense contractors, banks, and financial-services companies are not big fans of SaaS because of security and privacy issues. Nicolas Carr, of the IT Doesn’t Matter fame, has a new book The Big Switch, where he essentially expounds the concept of utility computing (aka SaaS) that Larry Ellison of Oracle and Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems talked about over ten years ago. However, Mark Benioff of salesfocre.com actually delivered the solution. Scott even predicted circa 1996 that pretty soon all appliances in your home would be networked and that your light bulbs or fluorescent lights would beg to be replaced before they die. Today, 12 years later, none of the appliances —toaster, microwave oven, refrigerator, freezer, washer or dryer — in my home have an IP address! As the late, great Arthur C. Clarke said decades ago, and I am paraphrasing it, we tend to overestimate the short-term implications and underestimate the long-term implications of a new technology.

New technologies, for the most part, supplement existing ones, and not totally supplant them. We believe SaaS will steal some thunder from the traditional perpetual-licensing model, but will not totally replace it.

What can do the Democrats in?

While Barack and Hillary are debating as to who is going to answer that phone at 3 AM, McCain flies to the Middle East to visit ‘friendly’ (read ‘oil-rich’) countries there. So, could in-fighting among the Democrats will bury them?

I suggested to a friend of mine a month ago that Barack should agree to be Hillary’s VP candidate; he laughed at me. Barack better settle for it; otherwise, as my friend speculated, the ever-shrewd Republicans are going to dig up tons of dirt about Chicago southside-raised, liberal-Princeton-student-in-the-1970s Michelle Obama, and use that dirt to bury Barack. And, with our country in such an economic mess —the dollar at an all-time low against most major currencies, oil flirting at $110 a barrel, gold over $930 an ounce, housing and sub-prime mortgage meltdowns — the last thing we can afford is another four or eight years of Republican idiocy and ideology.

How dumb can a state be?

In a recent article, The New York Times reported that the lawmakers in the State of West Virginia, where I obtained my Ph. D., gave final approval to a bill that allows hunting education classes in all schools where at least 20 students express interest. My question is: How more stupid can you be? Whereas states such as California, where I live now and call my home, and ‘developing’ countries such as BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) are investing in biotech, software, nanotechnology and other technologies that are shaping the 21st century, here is a stupid state investing in hunting education! This is akin to the Middle Eastern countries investing in education where almost 55% of the PhDs awarded are in Islamic studies! The modern world is being run by neither the 26 English alphabets nor the hundreds of Arabic or Chinese characters, but by ‘0’s and ‘1’s — it’s a cyber world.

West Virginia ranks among the bottom five of the 50 states in the U. S. in almost all categories — per-capita-education spending, healthcare, infrastructure spending, corporate tax incentives…And, here is a state that, for the first time in its history, voted for a Republican presidential candidate — George Dubya — in 2000. Why? Because Dubya in the last minute flew in NRA President Charleston Heston who convinced the dumb mountain dwellers that, if they voted for Al Gore, they would lose their rights to own guns and couldn’t hunt anymore! The result: West, by Gawd, Virginia is still stuck in the 20th century and, with its corrupt politicians, is emulating third-world countries. West Virginia is a beautiful state, but its politicians are making it ugly.