Actually, we might be better off if police spent more time playing Wii Bowling and less time fighting the “war on drugs” … whatever that is.

This is a somewhat provocative article in the NY Times about the end of the glory days of enterprise IT.  Not so provocative among IT circles, but certainly within the mainstream media.

There is some truth to what he is saying in the sense that most of the core high-value business problems have already been solved to death: accounting, HR, manufacturing, logistics, customer management, etc. They were repeatedly solved in successive waves on the  mainframe, client-server, browser, and now SaaS.  I think Siebel is right in saying that the time has passed when money can be made by just showing up, connecting a known business problem to a target architecture and implementing the obvious use-cases.  As my colleague Bob is fond of saying, we’ve hunted all the buffalo, as it were.  Jumping into the buffalo hunting business now is not going to be wildly profitable.

The one business problem that hasn’t been solved very well is: security.

My opinion right now is that most of the innovation is happening at the bottom of the stack, particularly with virtualization and cloud-based architectures.  Until now this has largely been about cost and efficiency within the IT organization, not identifying and solving new business problems.

I suspect this will start to change as technologies like column-oriented databases start to get some uptake within enterprise IT.  Vast volumes of data have been collecting for years in relational databases, most of which can’t really be utilized in any practical way.  SOA has helped somewhat, but for the most part, this is like connecting some lakes together with soda straws and calling it a canal system.

So what new, as-yet-unidentified business problems can be solved with cheap, massively parallel, on-demand cloud-based processing?

This woman is stranger than fiction.

I like Robert Reich a lot.  He’s a bit more left-leaning than I am, but I have a hard time disagreeing with him on most issues.

But his most recent blog post really caught my eye:

Universal health insurance won’t happen unless Obama can light a fire under the Senate Finance Committee this week. Within the next two weeks, the Committee must report out a bill that contains a public option and a credible source of money (either limiting deductions of the wealthy to 28 percent or capping tax-free employer-provided health care, or some of both). Obama then has to get both the Senate and the House (which reports out a bill today) to approve their respective bills before August 7, when Congress heads home for recess.

Why is timing so important? Because the health-care clock is ticking, and doesn’t have many weeks left. Universal health care is so complicated — touching on so much of the economy, stepping on the toes of so many vested interests — that to allow the bills to languish past recess risks the entire goal. Speed is essential.

This strikes me as more than a little odd.   If health care reform is so complicated, shouldn’t we start by accepting that speed is not essential? After all we’re talking about reforms that have impacts lasting longer than anyone alive on this planet.

Instead of trying to ram some legislation though, perhaps we can just slow down and come up with a bipartisan roadmap that everyone can agree with.  We would then have years to start picking away and implementing this road-map.

The first step of this road-map could be: The US health care system needs substantial reform.  Anyone that disagrees with this ought to be voted straight out of office in the next election.

Vinnie Mirchandani’s blog, Deal Architect , is one of my favorites covering the enterprise software industry. I thought this post was especially honest and direct:

“Technology is becoming to cheap to meter”

says Chris Anderson at Wired. And he encourages “waste is good” by invoking Moore’s Law and the impact it has had on cheap personal computing.

Two basic flaws in Chris’s arguments

a) Moore’s Law does not apply consistently across technology spend. Outsourcing and telecomms in particular, and most software do not have a “lower prices increase volume” mentality. You have beat it out of them. Microsoft list prices for its Dynamics or Office products have not changed much for years. You have negotiate higher discounts each year to get any semblance of Moore’s Law out of them. Most outsourcers have inflation clauses and fight like hell to pass along any productivity gains in their performance. HP continues to charge $ 5,000 a gallon for ink for decades old printer technology. AT&T’s international roaming charges are the ultimate salute to Moore’s Law – salute as in flipping the bird by refusing to budge even as around them Skype and alternate providers can deliver at a fraction at their rates.

b) He extrapolates what we can get as consumers to corporate world. You and I can get storage at $ 100 for a ITB. For that price, I know several corporations that pay that much for 1 GB over 3 years. Sure, it is Tier 1 storage – much different grade than what you and I get, but that’s also 1,000 times the price. You and I can get a single Geek Squad visit if we have a home computer problem. Most corporations sign up for multi-desktop, multi-year support contracts at massively higher price points.

I look forward to the day when enterprise technology is too cheap to meter. Because that will be the day I am out of a job and I can go fishing full-time…

Source: Deal Architect

Click image to watch video

This is a fascinating little segment about consumer technology adoption that compares quality and cost. The subject at hand is Compact Fluorescent Lighting, but his thinking is applicable to a lot of consumer technology adoption challenges.

I overheard a few people who were pleasantly surprised how much they got for their unwanted jewelry.

I’m fully expecting gold to go through a spectacular bull market bubble over the next few years. When the cash-for-gold operations close down and are replaced by similar gold-for-cash operations, we’ll know the top is near. But for now, I want to be a buyer of gold, not a seller.

The city should be thinking of reasons to hire this guy, not arrest him.

Schwarzenegger also urged Democrats to ignore lobbying by their union allies against sharply lower spending levels to help balance the state’s books.

“Do they want to protect the workers that provide the services, or do they want to protect the people that get those services? The choice is up to them,” he said.

Let’s give a round of applause to Schwarzenegger for saying this.

Every time I turn on the radio or TV I hear state workers bitching and moaning about proposed cuts to their already generous salary and benefits.  NEWS FLASH: YOUR EMPLOYER IS BANKRUPT.

The idea that an employee is in a position to make salary and benefit demands from an employer that is bankrupt is just preposterous.  I have absolutely no sympathy for these people.  None.