Eric Schmidt on 92nd Street Y, the 10 october 2012

Every year or two, Eric Schmidt gives us his, thought a lot, point of view about the current state of the tech business world. He comes back on the various tech industry leading companies, and promises us a world of useful mobile computations.

Open source should be banned

Open source is one the biggest scam of the lasts decades. And as all big bad wolf, it is hidding in sheep clothes. It's a perversion of a nice idea. It all started with the free as in free speech software mouvement. But the contagious characteristics of freedom prevent sane business to build upon it. As business drive this world, freedom let place to open source. It was good for business. You don't have to pay for licenses anymore. You can concentrate on your business. And it gets better over time for free. Ohoh, the scam arguments starting to appear.

So companies all over the world started to adopt it. Some companies, even promote it. They can now outsource for free their I.T. development. They can also share the cost of maintenance with their competitors. But the better part for companies, is that they got leverage on their developpers. There are now two kinds of I.T. man, the vast majority are I.T. workers spending their time assembling, maintening and pipelining the various bricks of open source software, where as the remaining minority is consenting to create great wealth and be rewarded with breadcrumbs. If you want to be a part of the glorious minority, all you have to do is to participate in open source. This is why companies often requires you to have contributed to an open source project before they employ you. For companies, contributors are like old prostitutes, they don't shine but they will do anything for a few dollars.

But who get spoiled in the way ? Well obviously, the I.T. man is getting lifted. 

Then there are all the companies that use open source. They think they are getting advantage of it, but in fact they are the fall guys. By using open source, they surrender and consent to be a few years late, their developpers always running to catch the next patch. It's basically saying they are refusing to compete on the software ground.

So I guess that in a concurrential world where companies collude, end users are getting spoiled too, aren't they ?

Why Work in Information Technology is doomed to failure

I have been developping software for a few years now. Both in small and big companies. And in both cases, there are more and more needs with regards to software functionalities. But what I have noticed is that over the last few years there is a shift currently taking place. 

It is a shift similar in nature to the transformation from craftmanship to industrialized era over the course of a decade. A few years ago, writing something from scratch leveraging on generic libraries was quite often a good choice. Now, most of the time, it is not. Today you will often find code right for the specific functionnality you need. 

The work in Infomation technology has shifted from building to customizing. Sure you can customize a lot faster than you can build and therefore are a lot more productive in the economic sense. But it is a profound change like going from leader to follower, or from active to passive. 

But we are not over yet, it is all about scaling. And in computer science, it is often an exponential scaling. But user needs, at least the monetizable ones, don't scale as fast. And that where it's getting bad for the IT man. One man and a few dollars can serve millions of users. And what's even worse is that one man and a few more dollars can serve tens of millions of users. Systems are build to scale by adding money in it rather than by adding people.

So how as an IT man, can you get advantage of this. I see a few options.

Either be among the few best, to get a chance to work on the few remaining jobs building new useful stuff used by many. You can also choose to join an open source project. These two first options are quite good for the philantropic mind, others you will be forced to pass your way.

An other option is to start it up. Create a business, where you can use your I.T. skills. You will also need a lot of other more useful skills. The probability of failure is high, but a small chance is better than no chance right ?

The last option, is to work somewhere else, nobody is forced to be a programmer right ?

This blog is evolving

I am now jobless.
This mean, I will have more time to better explain ideas. The format and the subjects will change.
Becoming more diverse and accessible to the novice.
It will also be more subjective.