DoomPorn and IT
In the Beginning
For nearly 15 years I had been a federal government IT employee. During that time I managed everything from a small "data center" (managing 15 total servers in Japan), to Director of Architecture for Army Europe, and finally the Chief Architect for data centers within the USDA; a job I left in November of 2014.
After having left my prior employment, and having co-founded a company with another former federal data center architect where we specialize in Cloud consulting and products (namely OpenStack and SDN), I am noticing that things are decidedly different on the other side of the fence.
To be specific, I am talking about...
...IT DoomPorn
Since going into business I had become a bit obsessed with reading every single tech article I could. I had to know who was doing what; what my current competitors were up to; who was a new competitor; what broke; what worked; what was going on.
I have set up twitter feeds. I have a slack account which has "rooms" for each feed so I can easily segregate my news. I have Google alerts. I review twitter in and ad hoc fashion daily. I follow slashdot.com and technewstube.com... I share articles with friends and advisors. I do this, and more. I am routinely up until the early morning to catch up on the days activities and my reading.
And you know what I have learned in these few months of being in business?
Everything is Failing
Now, of course, we know this is complete B.S., everything is not failing. IT is advancing at an impressive pace. However, if you avidly read the various tech blogs and the articles from the pundits, yes the pundits (pejorative inflection intended), you would think that it is true; that all things are in fact going horribly wrong.
True, there are the fanboi articles (paid?) about this technology or that, regaling us with prose about the supreme benefits of the next smart-device or start-up du jour; about how these devices or companies will cure whateer ails us.
However, there are numerous (significantly more?) articles about how one company made a bad move, how another will fail because of some recent change they made or deal they struck, or how the latest device is doomed to failure.
While working within the federal government I watched this news with a degree of amusement. It did not affect me after all. Now that I am in the business I am seeing it for what it truly is...
It is DoomPorn--And it is Destructive
Admittedly I am an OpenStack fanboi...
I am also a VMWare fanboi, and I have been one since 2003. In addition, I am an iPhone fanboi, Android fanboi, MySQL fanboi, NoSQL fanboi, Novell fanboi, Solaris fanboi, Linux fanboi, and more. However, there is a distinct difference in the hurdles that companies must overcome today versus those producing new products 5-10+ years ago.
If you search for a company or technology today you will be inundated with dozens of articles per day about how it is/isn't ready for this or that; how it will/won't do one thing or another; how it does/doesn't meet enterprise needs.
Little of that existed from 2003 - 2007
For fun I did a Google search of all articles about a VMware from Feb 23, 2002 to Dec 31, 2003, when VMware was breaking out (I did Feb 23 because that is what I clicked on, not because the date has any significant importance). How many articles addressing the potential success or failure of virtualization or VMware appeared in the results?
Zero
I believe I was on page 6 before I saw a single inforworld.com article (which was positive). All of the rest of the hits were either VMware.com articles, posts from partners or adopters, or posts on forum sites where geeks were getting their virtualzation-on.
I stopped reviewing hits at page 10 (yes, I not only clicked past page 2 on Google search results, I actually went all the way to page 10). There were not dozens of articles per page blathering on about how good/bad virtualization would be or how things will/won't go in the future.
Pretty much every hit was either positive in nature (I.e. announcing partnerships and advancements), or the hits were on various forums wherein geeks were helping geeks be better geeks and they were helping each other to deploy this new thingamajig to get virtualization going.
iPhone searches
Also came up mostly positive. In searching from Jan 1, 2005 - Jan 1, 2007 (covering the iPod transition to iPhone) I found very few derogatory articles; although there were decidedly more pundit sites than I found in my prior search during an earlier period.
Most of the articles dealt with iPhone rumors regarding technology advances and peripheral products. However, there was on article on page 3 which is a perfect example of the DoomPorn which is now rampant and which can cause a negative effect on a company or product:
Why the Apple phone will fail, and fail badly
h ttp://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12/23/iphone_will_fail/?page=1
(Guess they missed the mark on that one)
Contrast that with today
Today it is all Doom
For example, if we look at the articles of the past two days there are dozens upon dozens of articles about the closure of an OpenStack company. These articles are almost giddy in their celebration and review of the reasons (opinions) around this company's closure.
And they don't stop there.
These articles then, in the same article, take aim at other purveyors and vendors in the market space and provide their expert opinions on whether or not this or that company will fail; on whether or not this company or that is headed in the right direction; on whether or not this technology or that will prevail. They are, in my opinion, casting aspersions upon these other companies based on the opinion of the author and they are laden with innuendo and have few facts or personal experience.
These articles and posts are designed to be sensational. I feel like I should be listening to music from Philip Glass every time I read one of these articles. They need a soundtrack.
Unfortunately this opinion and innuendo has real world consequences
When companies fail something is lost. Technology disappears, people become unemployed.
Sure, sometimes they need to fail. Other times their failure may be hastened, or precipitated, by punditry. Real decision makers read these opinions and make real decisions based upon them and these decisions affect the real world.
Some of today's largest companies may not exist if they had to deal with today's IT press.
I hate to think what would have happened if companies of the early 2000's, or before, had to deal with the kind of constant and intense scrutiny that new companies have to deal with today. This constant barrage of nay-sayers and second-guessers.
If they did we may well not have many of the technologies and devices we have available to us today (email, Microsoft Windows, iPhones, VMware, MySQL, etc...) as those companies or organizations would have been destroyed by those with opinions and a large number of friends or followers.
These articles and blogs have real world impact. They have an effect on everything from adoption to stock prices, even though they are sensationalist in nature and their content is only opinion deep.
Was it always this way?
No, no it wasn't.
Today we see daily, almost hourly, articles about how one company or another is outdoing another with regards to OpenStack or SDN; how one company stumbled or faltered or made a mistake; how containers do/don't beat VMs; how this start-up or that can't withstand the pressure of the bigger players; how the bigger players can't withstand the pressure of the innovative start-ups. All Doom--all the time. No one is doing anything right.
It is like reading posts on politics.
It is sad
Sad that the great things that come out of IT today are being relegated to the whims and opinions of those that would otherwise be well suited to work for the likes of the major cable news networks.
Sad that good companies with great ideas are struck down before their prime because pundits and fanbois over-hype and/or over-criticize them before they have a chance to prove themselves.
Thought-leadership
Is a term that is thrown around quite a lot today. Wouldn't it be great if there were more opinion agnostic articles which expressed this thought-leadership vs. the current trend of thought-destruction?
Oh what a world that would be.
In Closing
While I find the state of the IT press a bit lacking today, I will continue to read articles and posts on IT; however, I will always take them with a grain of salt and hear this in the back of my mind while reading them....
Dubstep Remix if you like: https://youtu.be/Bmy58HhKMtc
Rick Kundiger
The views and opinions expressed in this post are solely my own. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of Awnix Inc., the Awnix Inc. staff, and/or any/all Awnix Inc. customers, partners or affiliates.