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Paul Zucker

December 2000

Information Age

Submitted for Most Entertaining category

(The year we entered with spare hardware, spare software and spare underwear, just in case)

The year 2000 will stand out in IT history, and not just because it was "that year". It was the year we had to face the implications of many of the changes in society that technology has caused. It was the year when we started to ask "just because we CAN do it, should we?"

What threatened to be by far the most significant aspect of 2000 fizzled out within minutes of the year starting. No planes fell out of the sky, few businesses suffered more than temporary hiccups in their office systems and the popular media lost interest. Y2K is the biggest IT story of the nineties, and that's where it belongs.

In late 1999 cynics said that the IT industry would win whatever happened. If Y2K turned out to be as bad as speculated, IT people could say "See, we told you it was bad!" and if it turned out to be minor, they could say "Look, All that money you spent fixing your systems paid off. We saved your bacon."

Somehow the reverse happened and the media cried "Just as we predicted - there never was a problem, you scaremongers. You pulled off the biggest scam ever seen. You fleeced us."

It was a no-win situation after all. But then, how could we expect to be thanked for saving the human race from a disaster WE created?

Flowing on from Y2K was the question of IT skills shortages. Would we suddenly find unemployment in a sector where supply was never able to meet demand? GST was touted as the saviour here, as everyone scrambled to update their systems to allow for this horrendously complicated system.

"Let's see, remove all the old, disparate taxes and replace them with a single 10 percent tax. How will we do that coding in less than five years?"

GST should have been a boon for at least one market segment - accounting software developers. So how come some of them have had terrible years, posting record losses? Blame it on the IT people - it could never be the marketing experts, after all.

IT staff shortages continues to be an important news topic. Some observers say that there isn't an Australian shortage, just one in Sydney and Melbourne. The IT press has spent a lot of space discussing the issue this year, with a common theme being regional IT people who write in to say they can't get a job.

The expected decentralisation of the industry might have happened in the call centre industry, but not in mainstream IT development and operations. Overseas companies that choose Australia for their regional base tend to choose key centres like Sydney, not regional locations, no matter how politically acceptable it may be. After a 20+ hour flight, the last thing the visiting bigwigs want is another flight to Bringapressieback (excepting, of course, the flight they take to Cairns on the way back overseas).

Australia's falling dollar is another factor that keeps costs down for these overseas companies. As long as they don't want to buy anything from the US that is. Vendors say that real costs of IT hardware and software are now lower in Australia than they are in the US, but this can't continue. Most say that unless we soon see a significant increase in the pacific peso (which really means a drop in the value of the US dollar), import prices will have to increase dramatically.

The Internet has played an important role in keeping consumer goods prices down in Australia, We're closer to an international pricing model than ever because online buying has exposed price differences. While the proportion of goods bought online is still minuscule, consumers are now aware of the differences -- and complain - by email.

Not that the price of imported CDs matters much, if you believe the music industry. The explosion this year of MP3 in general, and Napster in particular, has been described as the end of commercial music. Early, unofficial figures show, however, that there has been absolutely no change in buying patterns, so go figure.

Napster looks like a vast pirated music repository. Users download some free software then search for and retrieve music and other audio files. You remember that somewhere you heard Woody Allen do a funny stand-up about running over a moose, so you fire up Napster and search on the keywords "Woody" and "Moose". A few minutes later you're the proud possessor of a 10 Megabyte file. I say "possessor" and not "owner" because legally you don't own the file, of course. One or more people own the copyright to the material, so what you've just done is no more legal than pressing the 'record' button on your VCR when the same skit is played on TV.

Napster's role in all this is moot now, because the company has done a deal which will soon see some sort of royalty payment system for such downloads. But Napster has no monopoly on the system because it doesn't hold the files, just a database that connects two Napster users together - one holding the file and the other wanting the file, both connected to the Internet.

The Internet is involved in just about every major IT happening this year. Just look back at the headlines and you'll see what I mean. Who could forget the famous "I Love You" worm attack? Not only did it show up how "holey" modern PC applications are (Microsoft's included) but how dependent we've become on Internet communications.

2000 was the year management discovered that when an employee was busy tapping away at the keyboard, he/she wasn't necessarily preparing a killer PowerPoint presentation for the company's AGM. What with email, online shopping, playing games and all the other fun things to do online, some studies underway at the moment are expected to show that the average private use of the Internet at work may be in excess of two hours a day.

Not only does management have to come to terms with lost productivity and hogging of the bandwidth which would otherwise go on company business, but there's now the very real question of legal responsibility and exposure. The IT department is dragged into the question by being required to report on usage patterns, install filters and even assist in management to read what could only be considered private communications. After all, even if the company has a policy of no private phone calls, does building services get asked to put a tap on everyone's phone line?

The flop of the year has to be WAP. The idea that people would want to pay exorbitant, dial-up mobile phone rates to receive a tiny monochrome subset of a web page will go down as the ultimate example of blind optimism. Second generation mobile phones are useless as far as data goes. The sooner we get 2.5G and 3G phones the better. These offer packet switching, not call switching, so sending a message will cost a couple of cents, not a couple of dollars.

You had to be quick to keep up with the acronyms and abbreviations in 2000. Most of them were invented by the marketers and most of them were for exactly the same thing - doing business! It reached a peak when someone came up with the ultimate B2R (back to reality).

Most of the good .com names have been taken, so this year ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) introduced seven new generic top-level domain names -- .biz, .info, .name, .pro, .museum, .aero, and .coop. Presumably someone has already registered funny.biz, whatsina.name and chicken.coop, but you have my permission to try

The company we all love to hate (and whose shares we love to buy) is Telstra. It lived up to its reputation by getting all the wrong publicity in 2000 -- for sacking record numbers of employees while making record profits -- by attempting to pay too much to buy overseas businesses - for keeping competitors out of anything that makes money.

Take the local loop for example. Telstra is obliged to relinquish this monopoly on the copper wire between its exchanges and subscribers, but it's doing a good job of slowing this to a crawl. Within two years we're all supposed to have broadband access at home, mostly via ADSL, but again Big T stands accused of setting wholesale ADSL charges beyond the means of ISPs and secondary carriers. They could resell ADSL, but at a loss.

Linux continued to enjoy great popularity. Now that IBM has fully embraced it, we understand that an article in Encarta 2001 will show that Bill Gates invented it in 1979. Speaking of the world's richest man ... he still is. They tried to break his company in two, and by the time they do both halves will be bigger than the whole is today.

Microsoft is bigger than the GDP of more than half the countries in the world. Perhaps it should have a place on the United Nations, if not the Security Council.

2000 was a year of births and deaths. Lots of web-based businesses were born and lots died - some within the same year. It was the year that processors zoomed past 1GHz, the year that DVD took off as both a storage and an entertainment medium and year that Amazon Books still made a huge loss.

It was the year that GST made things so much cheaper that there was a four percent jump in the cost of living, the year that all the analogue phones were taken up to the back paddock and put out of their misery and the year that we discovered how easy it was to get addicted to online auctions. (Anyone want to buy an inflatable kangaroo on a bike?)

It was the year of the Wireless LAN (again), the year we got ADSL (25 subscribers at last count) and the year that the Internet replaced print journalism (you are reading this on the Internet I hope?)

What's in store for 2001? (Apart from it being the first year of the new millennium ... but I didn't have to tell IT people that, did I?)

Will it be the year of the digital you - where we all adopt an online profile that makes it easier for the right people to contact us and harder for the wrong people to? Will it be the year they try to introduce the Australia Card again (sorry ,,, the Medicare Record Smart card)? Will it be the year when to get a job in the IT industry you need people skills as well as Linus skills? Only 12 months will tell.

"Microsoft announced today that its Y2K patches for Windows NT were on schedule for delivery in first quarter 1901."

There was once a famous programmer who recognised the Y2K problem years before it became mainstream. He spent his time telling everyone how dangerous the problem was and begging people to put money into fixing it. After all, he and people of his era had written the original code that was soon to be quite inadequate for the task. As the day approached he was so worried that he had himself cryogenically stored, to be thawed out when the necessary technology was invented, in the new age after society recovered from the Y2K meltdown.

The next thing he knew he was in a warm room, surrounded by white-coated people with hair fashions and facial tattoos in styles he'd never seen or even imagined before.

One of the people at his bedside spoke softly. "Now don't be alarmed. Your cryogenic bunker was sealed with a system that wasn't Y2K compliant. You've been locked away for 8000 years. In fact, that's why we've woken you - it's the year 10,000 next year and your file says you know Cobol."

Paul Zucker

Freelance Journalist

(02) 9652 2772

paul@zucker.com