Pampers and Clouds: The end of an IT generation

Geek Squad Dave first gained notoriety in the newsgroups for his very public lack of ability to grasp the basic concepts of vendor and client management and dealing with cost structure changes. After being condemned in public by most of his peers Geek Squad Dave became only the second person OWN will not do business with, which has apparently motivated him to become an unofficial spokesperson for one of our customer-direct competitors where he hopes to lead the drones of retail consulting IT failures like him – and god do I wish he succeeds. He also appears to be preoccupied with me for some reason even though I don’t remember ever meeting the guy. Here is his latest bit of “brilliance”:

I’ve been in this industry since Vlad was in diapers and I can assure
you the WAN bandwidth is always going to be behind LAN bandwidth. And that as bandwidth increases, the apps and data will too.

This is a part of the Geek Squad Dave’s argument on why most applications will just never make it to the cloud. Now, for this to work I am going to need you to ignore a few things. The last time I was in diapers was about 28 years ago or so.. so please ignore for a moment that this genius comes from a man who has been virtually unemployed for that period of time and failed to even accidentally be successful enough to hire another person. Please also ignore the flawed logic of “this has failed before, so it will surely fail again.” Also ignore the billions of dollars being pumped into the transformation of IT infrastructure by every major vendor. Let’s also ignore the wisdom of people who work with network engineers, developers, major IT powerhouses all of which are indicating that this is the direction they are strongly focusing on. That’s just how much ignorance you’ll need to think that we are not on a cusp of the most significant change in computing during most of our lifetime. Pampers stage included.

You see, for the longest time we’ve had this shift of computing and processing power from mainframe to PC, from PC to server, from server to workstation and the trend always flowed to the device with the most computational power because that is what transformed data into something useful. But over the last few years we have seen the relevance of a local area network diminish. Change in paradigm? Change in trust? Change in cost and affordability? It doesn’t really matter why, it matters that the computing experience is no longer dependant on you being a part of some segmented network that needed to be managed, monitored, tuned and audited around the clock. Your phone accesses the same Internet. It sends around the same email. It provides similar services, often better and more reliable if at times even cheaper. Ever tried to print a picture across the Internet and pick it up at a local CVS? Or have a picture book shipped to your doorstep?

The large data set argument is the last one in the defense of the local area network and is by far the most flawed of them all. If the data set grows, the processing power needed to manipulate it grows. Major movie studios do not render their movies on expensive standalone SGI’s anymore – they render them on server render farms. Major database and transaction systems no longer sit on monolithic clusters fighting a storage medium bottleneck – you’ve guessed it, data farms. Large files, voice, video – all within the reach of your cell phone powered by a tiny battery.

Welcome to the future. (PDC ’08 Sessions)

As the cloud computing becomes more prevalent medium for long term storage, processing, scalability and affordability, what unique feature will bring computing back to the confines of the LAN? That my friends is what is crushing guys like Geek Squad Dave right out of their almost-business, the inability to deal with change combined with lack of expertise to seize the opportunity. It is what separates IT solution providers from independent Geek Squad guys running out and “trust recommending” the solutions. One provides solutions, the other picks out laptop bags and offers input on which version of Quickbooks or Office you should buy. The successful IT solution providers of today and tomorrow are the ones who stay informed and can demonstrate the ability to help a business be successful in the modern times.

The opportunity is incredible. And the only requirement is shedding the ignorance.

This is the most exciting time to be in the IT space, bar none. And if you think you’ve seen this before… your mind is starting to go, a good indication that you’re closer to diapers than I am.