Think back to the late 1980′s – the PC is pervading offices and I am running the Information Centre in Mobil Oil, developing small PC applications and running a Help Desk.
Every day a business user would come to me with a well thumbed copy of PC Magazine to show us some whiz-bang PC they had seen or some software they wanted.
My job was to ‘hold the line’ and stick to the strategy – 3 year refresh cycles. More often than not they had greater desktop processing power at home than at work – I certainly did. What we had not grasped was that the PC had become consumer technology – the IT department had to catch up.
Fast forward to late 2011 and we have the Cloud. How many IT managers are still ‘holding the line’ ? Now they face users with well thumbed iPads accessing their holiday photographs from their Cloud storage saying it’s going to revolutionise the way they work.
This time it is the 5 year outsourcing deal that stops them embracing the change.
So has Cloud become consumer technology now ?
My view is that it’s well on the way – with iCloud here and G-Cloud on the way we will be using it as consumers and citizens before we know it.
Should I be worried ? Only if I was back running my old IT Department.
January 19, 2012 at 8:52 am
Thanks for the memories. In 1989 I wrote “apps” using Turbo pascal and z80 assembly language that ran in 16k of RAM. The funny thing is those apps were more usable and quicker than todays iphone apps
January 19, 2012 at 10:09 am
How topical – what with Argy-bargy in the south Atlantic, a whig government in London and exactly 30 years to the day since the publication of ‘The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4′ we can confirm that your time-machine is working fine.
I had to refer to my LinkedIn to remember what on earth I was upto in 1989. It was nothing to do with writing applications but I do tend to agree that Cloud is a game changer. Time will tell.