Information technology has our trust. Or does it? Curiously, almost everything we do today depends on it, yet we cannot implicitly trust it to work.
Yahoo mail has been a fixture of my life since the last millennium. But for months now, I have had to deal with what suspiciously appears like well-orchestrated "invalid password" refusals of entry. After six years, I`d say I probably know my own password, especially since I remember my postal code at the time of signing up, which is the secret answer to the question that allocates a new password.
I think the take-home wisdom is that IT is like any other industry.
Carel Alberts, Journalist, ITWeb
At other times, the page just crashes (typically twice), at which time the system runs out of ideas and lets the persistent user in.
Is it possible Yahoo is too successful, and has enough users? It can`t be a technical problem, because this might have been solved after several months of the same mass phenomenon. (I presume it`s not just me, since the first two Yahoo users other than myself I encountered have had the same problems.)
More suspicious is the fact that you cannot find anybody to complain to. Perhaps the free e-mail model isn`t working for Yahoo anymore. Perhaps its service to me would be different, had I taken any of the premium services. If not, how can it keep offering a premium service in the face of so many problems? Yahoo has never, to my knowledge, publicly assured its customers of its attention in the matter.
Oh well, one could say, it`s IT, and one can always fall back on the presumption that it`s too hard to worry your head over. Even after months of the same thing, I might have just turned my back on Yahoo and never thought about it again, but it`s not an isolated phenomenon.
Similar examples are rife. Most recently, security company eEye Digital Security reported that a critical Microsoft patch "simply does not work", and Dell`s well-publicised comedy of errors in its attempts to upgrade its handheld`s operating system probably helped inspire this article.
What it means
What does this mean? Perhaps it`s just a time of glitches, when, as Isaac Asimov said, the molecules in the universe get slippery and recombine in unforeseen ways. Or maybe it is a combination of our massive reliance on IT and the industry`s progress in winning our unthinking trust.
If so, IT is the unfortunate victim of the expectations it created itself, and that is probably a good omen.
I think the take-home wisdom is that IT is like any other industry. It is subject to the same intense and mounting regulatory scrutiny and user expectations. And it is learning the hard lessons of many industries before it.
Like retail, its commoditised areas have to operate on slivers of margin. Like motoring, it knows it must move its own complexities away from the user (who in his right mind knows anything about torque?). And like electricity, it must work when you switch it on.
Where we`ve shown promise
Utility computing is the industry`s trump card, and will be our final coming of age, where we eschew proprietary lock-in and admit that other services, like electricity, have a far better running model than IT, because it just works.
But we`re not there yet. Provisioning storage into one logical pool, to be allocated as and when needed, is not the easiest thing to do today, as any systems integrator will attest.
When we do arrive, we will have to swallow the bitter pill of it having turned our whole product-centric industry into a commodity. And when it happens, it will also mean having to go the way of the BMWs of the world, where product differentiation is not so much the value of the service as that of brand itself.
The bright side is that a venerable motoring trick will then be part of our armoury - that of bundling expensive services that are more or less mandatory.
Then, and only then, can we be sure that it will work when we turn it on, and that the real money will come from services - like it or not.
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