brdudley (5/3/2011)
The past 30 or 40 years of IT has been a cycle of centralzing, then distributing computing. We keep trying to balance costs and control against agility and responsiveness. And it crosses all aspects -- hardware, software, programming, and management.As an industry, we probably need to spend more time considering risks and failure modes. We can't eliminate the human in the equation, so we need to do as much as possible to prevent errors, localize their damage, and have realistic contingencies for when they occur. Finally, when things really go wrong, there needs to be someone taking responsibility and communicating.
Agreed. The 1970's days of mainframe "IT Empire Building" have returned with a vengence in the form of server farms, virtual servers, software as a service, single vendor "solutions", and the "cloud" (Time sharing).
Microsoft is the present day equivalent of IBM in the 1960s & 70s.
Only the names have been changed to ensure profit margins...