gary’s web sofa

Robert Cringely has an interesting column today @ I, Cringely. He talks about the inability of IT staff to fit in today’s corporate structure. He’s been fired from every job he’s ever had for this reason. He’s also been re-hired several times because of his value to the company. IT is the “Cousin Itt” of industry. We’re “generally useful, though dangerous”.

IT staff, no matter how good, will never be CEOs of major corporations. The one exception, John Reid of Citicorp, just proves the point, because he got fired too. Therefore IT staff are useless employees and no good at being managers.

A friend of his gets paid way more than you’d expect for someone with no responsibilities, and reports direct to the CEO. Why? Because from time to time he saves the company from ruin. This is Cringely’s Door Number Three. The natural position for the IT personality in an organisation.

He sees this as a precursor of tomorrows corporate structure. IT staff are used to coming up with quick “good enough” solutions to rapidly evolving technical situations. The pace of change in the wider world is speeding up to match, so business structures need to change, with today’s IT departments, with their loose quasi-meritocracy structures being a possible solution.

From I, Cringely

I’ve tried to make sure the rugrats have a head-start when it comes to computers. #1 son has been playing with my PCs since he was 4 and has had his own PC since he was 8. Herself is inheriting a PC this year also. Pierce likes websites like howstuffworks.com and wikipedia.org but games are his thing, obviously. This isn’t such a bad thing because I’ve been known to indulge in virtual mindless violence from time to time myself.

One of our favourites is Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War. It’s a strategy game set in the distant future. You build and control an army and battle another army controlled by the computer or another player somewhere on the internet. It was fun until last Monday, when his Necron army so totally humiliated my Space Marine one that I gave up and ran away before he could wipe my army out. 

Consumer online backup provider The Linkup, formerly known as MediaMax, formerly known as StreamLoad just shut up shop and are telling people to go to box.net instead. Streamload split in half last year, spinning off a business orientated cloud storage platform called Nirvanix. I think the plan was for Streamload users to transition to the MediaMax software, and MediaMax would use the Nirvanix storage cloud as it’s back end. Well it looks like someone in MediaMax messed up in a big way. They started deleting data from the old storage infrastructure before verifying that it had made it’s way up to the cloud. They’ve lost anything up to 45% of their customer’s data. There seems to be a bit of a blame game going on, with Nirvanix and The Linkup blaming each other, but that doesn’t help those who paid for a service that they didn’t get.

Clouds are cool ‘n all, but what ever happened to K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid!). Simple architectures go wrong in simple ways which are easy to understand and quick to fix. The team in MediaMax obviously didn’t fully understand what they needed to do to safely move all their customer’s data over, and everyone is out of a job as a result.