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Captain Jake
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I.T. boom and bust.NET was Re: Gartner: Everything in Vista is based on .Net, ... ;)2006-12-26 09:43:34 AM delphi222 roman modic <XXXX@XXXXX.COM>writes <458d3b16$XXXX@XXXXX.COM> Quotewww.echannelline.com/usa/story.cfm legacy Windows code, some dating back to the introduction of the Windows 95 operating system, into the.Net framework, the software platform for the next generation of application development in the Microsoft Windows world. 'It is a necessary migration or forced march so to speak, in large part because everything in the Microsoft universe is increasingly moving around the .Net infrastructure,' stated Driver." In other words, a highly expensive and very risky activity (rewriting existing working code) is being forced upon vendors of Windows applications by MSFT. This seems to have a couple of interesting implications: 1) Not unlike the Y2K boondoggle, this will probably artificially prop up the demand for programmers at exactly the same time that there are fewer and fewer people actually getting into programming. While that bodes well for programmer salaries, it also bodes poorly for the quality of the code being written. That is depressing because the quality of most software being written is already abysmal. 2) Because rewrites are very expensive and very risky, they will cause most firms that are teetering on the edge to collapse into full-scale financial failure. There will be a culling of the ranks of software vendors, as only the strong can survive something as foolhardy as a complete rewrite of their software. 3) The combined result of this boondoggle could very well be an initial large shift in wealth from non-programmers to programmers (caused by higher salaries and more people being lured into programming by the artificially inflated salaries), followed by a frantic game of musical chairs as the existing ranks of programmers find that the boom has gone bust because many of their employers fell on hard times caused by the cost of the rewrites. We can probably even predict that approximate timing of the bust by looking at the point that businesses think that customers want Vista-specific software, and then adding the length of the typical software development life-cycle, and then finally adding the time it takes firms to realize they are going to miss their numbers. Judging from my own personal perceptions of the labor market right now for software engineers and developers I would venture a guess that the boom has already begun. At some point it will reach a critical mass, where most of the inertia is caused by the herd mentality rather than anything else. This would be the point at which most firms wanting to rewrite for .NET are doing so only out of the perception that they would otherwise be "left behind", not because they have any particular use for .NET. Some might say that we are already there. The Gartner story certainly implies that. Then the boom should continue until the product cycles start lagging in, and firms find that they have spent a ton of money just to get buggier products with the same or fewer features. At this point, real financial hardship starts to kick in, as firms have spent all this money but their customers are not seeing any new features. Precisely at the time that they have spent additional money on software development they will find that they are getting less revenue from their customers. (This is the inevitable result of doing a major rewrite of software for non-customer reasons.) As soon as the new software appears to be "complete" enough, those newly hired programmers are thus transformed into optional highly expensive cost-centers. Guys and gals that were proud of themselves for pulling in nice high salaries during the boom, and conceitedly telling themselves that the higher salaries were due to their obvious skills and abilities as programmers, will find themselves scrambling for fewer and fewer jobs. This whole I.T. boom-bust cycle occurred in the move from DOS to Windows, but the tail-end (the move to Win32) was followed by the artificial stimulus of the Y2K boondoggle, so the bust did not come until 2001. I should point out that there is a rich intellectual history behind this over-investment theory of booms and busts for markets in general. It is not just something that popped into my head while thinking about .NET. The evidence seems to support the over-investment theory of business cycles. -- ***Free Your Mind*** Posted with JSNewsreader Preview 0.9.7.3124 |