Happy New Year dear readers and welcome to 2009!
Seems like it was only yesterday we were worried about Y2K and concerned that computers worldwide would stop working leading to a global meltdown. Like Bernie Mac one said on stage, "People everywhere were scared shit-less, running around buying up all the water and sardines..." We'll miss Bernie.
But he was right. There were a bunch of people who benefited greatly from that scare. Mainly consultants who made businesses feel that they needed to get their houses in order before a major meltdown. Business owners got scared and coughed up the cash. Cash to review the problem. Cash to recommend fixed. And in many cases, do nothing.
Eight years have gone by and we've even fixed another problem that would have occured in 2038 -- known aptly as the Year 2038 problem. This is slowly being fixed by moving away from 32-bit computing to 64-bit computing. In short, the clock of a 32-bit computer which stores the time as a 32-bit integer (whole number) will run out of bits in 2038. A 64-bit integer is much, much larger so it won't run out of bits for a very, very long time.
The computer world has changed drastically. We're now seriously implementing virtual operating environments. Hardware virtualisation is the concept of software mimicking hardware. Because you have this software virtualisation layer, implementing and moving around software systems is easier to manage. Microsoft has become a huge player in the Internet space as well as building it's own virtual software system. It's Internet Explorer browser is by far the most popular browser on the planet despite many claims that it's the most flawed. What does this tell you? That software doesn't have to be perfect to sell. It only has to work most of the time. This is why all companies have IT departments. To manage the flaws.
Another huge area is security and wireless networks. Network and application security have become vital for even small businesses. We have read so many stories of stolen laptops with vital, unencrypted, information on them. Personal Computers that were left without adequate password protection. Companies that lost disks. Websites that were compromised and credit card information stolen. Even so, it doesn't seem as though many businesses have taken the hard line and secured the information they hold any differently. For large security companies and governmental organisations (say intelligence agencies and the police) these have always been standard, but some organisations haven't done much other than to add products to their environments. And with the growth of security issues there's been the accompanied growth of security companies and security consultants all selling security products. And then there's the proliferation of wireless access to the Internet and corporate networks. With this new products have also come up. The days of cabling aren't gone yet, however, the attractiveness of wireless communications make security interesting especially since we know that there nothing that is absolutely secure. If it was designed and built by a human being, then there's a way to break it. It might be difficult. It might take a long time. But it's not impossible.
Linux on the desktop has also matured. Not as fast as some of us would have liked to see it, but it has grown from a hobbyists and geeks operating system in the 90's to a corporate, competitive software system today. Companies like Novell, IBM, Sun and Oracle have backed it fully and do a lot of their development on that platform. Tells you a lot about the security of open systems. They work. Part of Linux's success must be the integration that many of the applications have with Microsoft Windows applications. Rather than build something completely different, Linux developers choose to woo Microsoft users by showing them that the learning curve won't be too steep. In addition, Microsoft is slowly, moving a lot of it's protocols to align with Internet and Open standards. They sometimes misbehave, for example when they created their new Office XML document standard, but I suspect that they will align themselves eventually with the Open Source world and eventually with Linux.
Microsoft has also had it's successes. Microsoft Office is without a doubt the most popular business application in use. Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint taking in the largest share. This is Microsoft's biggest money maker. Their Operating System department have also had some success. Windows XP was marginally better than Windows 2000 and somewhere along the road, when businesses wouldn't upgrade, Microsoft compromised, extended the support life of Windows 2000 till everyone got on board with XP. Windows Vista looks like it's going to be a dismal failure, however, if Microsoft is right, it's sales are climbing as adoption slowly begins to take hold. On the server side, without a doubt Windows 2000 server edition and it's upgrade Windows 2003 server edition have been a success. The migration process from Windows NT to Windows 2000 to Windows 2003 was very painless for many business and for some time the three systems could co-exists quite happily. Microsoft has also had success in purchasing companies that compliment it's products. Finance companies (like Great Plains) and E-mail security companies (like Sybari) are now part of the Microsoft family.
There are some companies that we thought were dead, or, confused as to what they were doing. Novell did a complete turn-around and purchased SuSE Linux, a German Linux company. They then hired a lot of SuSE developers to create an enterprise version of SuSE linux. One that could be sold for cash. One that had a tantalising support option and some interesting tools for management. They have also successfully been able to make deals with Sun Microsystem to develop parts of the Sun StarOffice system (Open Office) and make changes to the Spreadsheet application making it more compatible with Microsoft Excel. They are also partnering with Microsoft to bring Microsoft's Silverlight application to Linux, aptly named Moonlight. So even though Novell's Netware product looks like it will never get off the respiratory unit, things aren't looking so bad.
Sun Microsystems has also had a confusing time. God only knows what their plans are and I suspect that the only reason they're still hanging in there is due to their Java platform on which there are billions of code out there, as well as customer loyalty from Solaris and Sparc station users.
So, all in all, it's been an interesting eight years and we look to close off this decade by coasting to 2010. As I write this, the world economy is in recession which means that there will be a lot of chaos as businesses tighten their belts, spending cuts and lay-offs increase. Economists predict that it isn't as bad as we're making it out to be and that the worst is already over. Looking at my savings, I'm praying that they're right.
So Happy New Year readers and hopefully there'll be a lot more entertainment in this year than we endured in the latter half of 2008.
