This is the fourth excerpt from the first book in the Defen series: The Board Member’s IT Brief.

From chapter 2 “Evaluating IT Proposals

2.1 Processes and ground rules

Three kinds of IT proposals come to the board for decision:

1. Strategic plans;
2. Major projects; and,
3. Unexpected, one-time, expenditures.

These come to boards through two kinds of processes:

1. stealth; and,
2. with prior authorization.

The stealth approach, in which something that isn’t an emergency issue referred to the board by a committee head or the chairman, first comes to the typical board member’s notice as a hopefully entitled agenda item like “Approve Web Services Expansion”, is fundamentally inappropriate.

What management is usually looking for in a situation like this is pro-forma approval: legal cover for their actions. In the United States giving it to them without learning a bit more about what’s going on then you’re likely to get in the basic presentation isn’t going to meet your legal responsibilities -and in the rest of the world it won’t meet your fiduciary responsibilities either.

You see this kind of thing a lot, but it usually represents someone’s attempt to end run the board and should generally be quashed. The right process starts when either the board as a whole or a qualified committee authorizes the work leading to an eventual presentation calling for a yea or nay ruling by the board.

That prior board or committee authorization is the time to separate the strategic decisions from the merely tactical. Rule 0: Tactical decisions aren’t worth your time

For a decision to be strategic, and therefore worth board time, it must have real organizational consequences.

Decisions to do more or less of something the organization is already doing routinely represent tactical choices, as do decisions to change suppliers or methods within an existing information architecture. As such they’re in management’s purview, not yours.

Thus if you find management repeatedly bringing you decisions on things like changing suppliers for standardized IT services like PC help desk support, you should ask yourself whether there might not be some deeper governance issue at work.

A lot of volunteer agencies, for example, have grown large enough to maintain professional management while retaining the appearance of volunteerism at the board and fund raising levels. In these, bombarding the board with essentially pointless brand A versus brand B decisions is often management’s easiest way of ensuring the board’s irrelevance with respect to the real strategic decisions driving the organization - decisions they’re inappropriately abrogating to themselves.

Rule 1: it’s easier to criticize than propose, but some risks are worth taking and some worthless proposals contain gems

Before any board level IT decision comes up you should receive an advance information packet describing the objectives, recommended methods, and expected costs of both the decision management prefers and at least the do nothing alternative.

In evaluating those it’s important to start from a negative perspective while looking for things you can support in the proposal. This sounds conflicted, and is, but “Rule 1″ reflects a simple but brutal truth: most IT proposals are deeply flawed, and it’s just far more efficient, and less frustrating, to weed those out early. At the same time, however, even the worst proposals often contain gems - low risk things of real potential value to the organization.

Equally importantly, I think there’s a responsibility to sometimes say “Yes.” That may seem odd too, but one of the problems with IT governance is that simply saying “No” to everything, especially if you lose most votes, will eventually earn you a reputation as a tremendously effective judge of IT projects –because almost all fail to meet at least one, and usually two or three, of the usual criteria for success: on budget, on time, and “meets user expectations”.

The hidden message here is that IT appears to be about technology but is really more about people. Good people working in supportive environments can make miracles happen regardless of the technology available to them - but it’s your job to focus on the human issues that dominate governance, and one of those issues is your own role in creating and maintaining the needed “supportive environment.” So by all means attack bad proposals with gusto, facts, and determination; but make sure you also take the time to find ideas, and people, to be positive about.

In a perfect world the person you put in charge of IT will keep the board informed throughout the process leading to a request for decision. If the decision involves significant strategic risk that involvement should have depth - a real commitment to understanding, and incorporating, board level concerns before developing the recommended action plan. If, on the other hand, the project is sufficiently important to warrant board attention but involves little overall risk to the organization, a few informal briefings will usually suffice.

Rule 2: The slicker the pitch the steeper the slide to disaster - so break away to talk to those who do, not just those who talk.

Either way, who gets the face time with you during the entire process gives you an important clue as to how the project is likely to end. In an ideal world you will hear, during the pre-decision briefings and interviews, from the junior staff directly involved in researching the options. When that process matures and a board decision is finally called for, the ideal CIO should say something like: “I support this, I think it’ll be good for the organization, and I’m fully prepared to wear the consequences; but Joe here dreamt it up and did most of the research, so with your permission I’d like to ask him to talk about it.”

That’s the ideal, but it’s not what usually happens. Instead you normally get what I think of as the “craven clutch” - a couple of senior IT people and/or their consultants who are far more interested in budget and span of control issues than in technology or your organizational success.

In the worst cases your own CIO will hand over to an outsider, a consultant or supplier executive who does the actual board interviews and briefings, including the final presentation.

If so, this is likely to be an extra-ordinarily gifted salesman capable of delivering a polished presentation and appearing totally in control of the facts when asking or answering questions. Unfortunately, it’s usually an empty facade. Every big IT services supplier has its closers - the people they send out to do board level interviews, briefings, and presentations like these; but they’re sales people, not IT people.

Such people are simply far too valuable to waste their time actually doing IT, really studying your business needs, or meeting one on one with those of your people who will have to make this thing, whatever it is, work. All of that is done by their juniors, who then brief them on the way to meetings but aren’t invited to speak because they’re techies, and both the senior presenter and your own IT guy, who’s introducing him, are afraid they’ll blow the sale with too honest an answer if allowed to speak.

The guy they front, however, probably looks, acts, and sounds just like you would if you had time to read a good tech guide - he’s got the charm, the savoir faire, the contacts, the soothing words and social skills that go with being a board member. He’s one of you, he fits right in, and he’s very effective. That makes him extremely valuable to his employer, but dangerous to you. What you need is a good techie, and he might once have been one, but now he’s fallen victim to his own promotions.

The rule to remember here is simple: the longer and more impressive the guy’s resume, the longer it’s usually been since he’s done any real hands-on work and therefore the further out of touch he’ll be with respect to current technologies and current means of meeting your organization’s needs, and - most importantly- the longer the resume, the shallower his judgements will be about your organization.

Remember: he’s not compensated for, or interested in, getting the job done, he’s just compensated for, and therefore interested in, getting the job.

The answer, right from the initial briefings forward is simple: always speak directly to the real players. There will be people in your IT group who’re deeply involved: find them and listen to their concerns. There will be people in your user community who are deeply involved (if there aren’t, cancel the project early): find them, and listen to their concerns.

This is usually easy if your board represents something small like a community theatre because the players are in one place, formal barriers are minimal, and nobody’s career is at stake. It’s a lot harder in a big company or government agency where just finding the people may be hard, travel may be required, and lots of heavyweight organizational players will feel seriously threatened by your interest.

Ignore them. How hard, how easy, or how acceptable or unacceptable, an action is socially doesn’t affect whether it’s right or wrong - and speaking directly to the people on the front lines is always right.

In a big organization, you’ll have a research capability and budget: use them, but take the time speak to some of the junior players yourself. Remember: the more barriers your systems management throws up, the more suspicious you should get.

Rule 3: buyer beware, but keep a sense of perspective

The general rule in buying anything, of course, is “buyer beware.” In the particular case of IT project proposals, bear in mind that just about all significant IT projects fail to meet expectations with respect to one or more of budgets, timelines, specifications, or performance –but that essentially 100% of IT resumes report nothing but the outstanding success of every project the hero of the piece has ever been near.

Some truths don’t sell, and therefore get elided. The resume bragging about the hero’s contributions to a brilliantly successful SAP implementation isn’t likely to mention that he was laid off when the thing was cancelled - and you won’t hear a discouraging word from the reference who planned the project, hired him for it, and survived the ensueing debacle either.

In IT failure is the norm, but it is always someone else’s fault.

Some lies sell, and therefore get widely used - there’s a multi-billion dollar industry, for example, selling third party Windows security products.

Some lies are wink and nudge accommodations to stupidity. It’s common, for example, for governments and others to require that temporary staff (aka consultants) have at least three years of hands-on experience with whatever technology they’re being brought in to help with - even if it’s brand new - and the consultants, of course, routinely sign off on this.

The bottom line is simple: in IT everyone lies, but you have to understand the source of the lie before you can decide whether it matters.

Rule 4: If the expertise doesn’t match both the problem and the solution, the project will certainly fail.

But some lies do matter, especially the really big ones and, in IT, the biggest lie of all is that a computer is a computer is a computer. Specifically, that expertise earned working with one information systems architecture applies to all of them.

This is widely accepted, but absurdly wrong. If Dick and Jane are two systems experts with differing views on a technical issue, those views will reflect what Dick and Jane are absolutely certain they know about using computers and therefore the differences in the forces which shaped their opinions.

In most cases these differences, if they were clear to you, would seem technical and of minor importance relative to their managerial skills and understanding of the business - but experts see and fight over differences where outsiders see only commonalities, and just as the protagonists in racial or religious wars are usually willing to die to perpetuate differences that are invisible or unimportant to outsiders, so too will Dick and Jane unknowingly sacrifice your business to the unalterable certitudes imposed by their backgrounds. In fact, expecting Dick’s ideas to work with Jane’s technologies, or vice versa, will predictably have roughly the same effect as hiring a Catholic principal for a Protestant school in Belfast.

There is no such thing as generic IT experience. Experience pertains to an IT environment, a particular information architecture: put a Solaris guy in charge of a mainframe and you will get an organizational disaster- just as you will if you let a Windows guy run a Linux shop.

Remember: each technology community is defined by the management methods that it has evolved to fit its unique combination of opportunity, history, technology, and applications. Put someone from one community in charge of technology from another, and the knowledge he brings with him will be disconnected from the technology in use -meaning that almost all of the things he is least likely to ever question, will be wrong.

Thus Rule 4 is critical: for any strategic project: if the expertise doesn’t match both the problem and the proposed solution, the project will fail. No ifs, no buts, no maybe’s: it’s guaranteed.

Rule 5: ignore the cost and benefit numbers, but look cynically at the issues and periods they apply to

Every project proposal comes with some estimate of costs and benefits. These are guesswork; don’t take them seriously. Instead, look first at what the cost numbers focus on, and secondly at the time periods the benefits apply to.

Projects that are important to IT people, but not the organization they serve, are often characterized by a lot of detail on capital and deployment costs within IT, and the absense of comparable detail with respect to user costs and risks during installation.

There are exceptions: small project proposals may consist of little more than a plan to buy some hardware or software and make it work, but projects like that usually aren’t worth board time either; and, of course, smart consultants or IT staff can make a resume builder project look strategic - so remember rule 3: buyer beware.

What you’re fundamentally looking for in your evaluation is realism. It’s perfectly reasonable for the plan to say that costs to users are unknown, but they have to be acknowledged - and that’s true across the board for lots of non capital costs. If you don’t see that acknowledgement together with a real attempt to come to grips with both risk and change costs, assume somebody has a nice fantasy life, but get more cynical about the project.

The same principle applies on the time horizon side of the initial analysis. Basically, if the time period for benefit realization exceeds your board’s stable planning horizon -just write the project off, it’s either a total con or hopelessly naive.

In general, the longer the benefit period, the more you should get concerned. Everything changes, the hardware and software used in IT, cost structures, key staff, the tax and regulatory climate you operate in. Everything changes - so how well do you think multi-year benefit projections are going to work out?

A good way of looking at this is to look backwards instead of forwards. If they give you five year cash flow projections, get a proposal from five yeaars ago and see how well they did as forecasters then. For example, if this is 2008 and they’re asking you to approve an advanced XML document integration solution for breakeven on cash in 2011, you’re entitled to ask how their 2005 case management project is turning out. If that still isn’t working as predicted, and particularly if the failure excuse is “scope creep” (an IT phrase meaning that they didn’t get the requirements right and have been fighting users from the gitgo), you’ll have no obvious reason to believe today’s effort will fare any better.

A lot of popular press articles, and even some serious academic analysts, will tell you that the more complex an IT project is, the less likely it is to succeed; but this isn’t true. In IT complexity is not, by itself, a determinant of success: but duration is. The longer a project is expected to take to reach the point of technical and financial success, the less likely it is to ever do so.

In other words, if the time period shown for either or both the costs and benefits section in the project proposal is unrealistic, the thing is almost certainly a loser.

This, however, is one place where positive thinking can help. The right question may be whether the project can be broken up into independently specified and implemented pieces that can be rethought as things change around them. The even righter question, of course, is why IT management didn’t do this before the project got to you.

Summary:

The rules for making decisions about board level IT issues are simple: start with rule 0 - question management if they waste your time on tactical issues, and then apply the other five:

1. it’s easier to criticize than propose, but some risks are worth taking and some worthless proposals contain gems;
2. the slicker the pitch the steeper the slide to disaster - so break away to talk to those who do, not just those who talk;
3. it’s a buyer beware world, but keep a sense of perspective;
4. if the expertise doesn’t match both the problem and the solution, the project will certainly fail; and,

5. ignore the cost and benefit numbers, but look carefully and cynically at the issues and period they apply to.

Some notes:

1. These excerpts don’t include footnotes and most illustrations have been dropped as simply too hard to insert correctly. (The wordpress html “editor” as used here enables a limited html subset and is implemented to force frustrations like the CPM line delimiters from MS-DOS).

2. The feedback I’m looking for is what you guys do best: call me on mistakes, add thoughts/corrections on stuff I’ve missed or gotten wrong, and generally help make the thing better.

The architect who designed and contracted for the construction of my house had to file a copy of the blueprints with the City of Lethbridge. According to the city, however, those blueprints don’t exist.

The reason they don’t exist is that the city invested in “computerization” and in that process wiped out its organizational ability to remember the existence of records prior to about 1995. It’s not, you understand, that the records themselves have been lost or destroyed; what’s happened is that the city has no institutional memory of how to locate a specific record and therefore chooses to pretend, at least to the ordinary public, that those records don’t exist.

You see something similar with children who have a very hard time understanding that anything existed prior to themselves - and with all kinds of computer users for whom the old barriers to information access are so obviously insurmountable that anything not immediately available via the internet is effectively not available at all.

University students exemplify this: if google can’t find it, they can’t find it. Mention paper indexes and the traditional library search and what you get is polite disbelief accompanied by the complete dismissal of any reality, including yours, associated with older research sources.

Many bloggers, journalists, and consultants act the same way - especially, oddly enough, older ones. As far as they’re concerned anything not an extension of something they already have access to on the internet or their own machines does not have the power to affect reality - and that includes stuff from their own previous work lost to upgrades or other computing disruptions.

In response I’d like to propose an existence theorem for information in the internet age: “if it isn’t on line, it isn’t.”

There’s an old saying about the devil making work for idle hands - so there I was last week, feeling a little bored and idly clicking through a story both about and by some guy named Whitehorn who’s going to blog an extensive development project based on the forthcoming Microsoft server stack. The opening paragraphs in the write up make sense and it seemed like an interesting project to follow - at least until I got to the self congratulatory rationale for leading this organization down the garden path:

If an application runs fine on version eight of your preferred RDBMS, why would you even consider upgrading to version nine? The best you can possibly hope for is that it continues to run fine (no gain there then); the worst is crash, burn and time to find a new job elsewhere. This is why we have production systems still running in COBOL.

Our current database is running on SQL Server 2005, sitting on Windows Server 2003. We are also using Analysis Server 2005 to produce the OLAP cubes and ProClarity for the data visualization. It works. So why am I sitting here, two months shy of the launch of SQL Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008, desperately seeking servers that will run this entire 2008 stack and porting an application that will go live (for a subset of the users) long before the summer?

Masochism and/or bravado spring to mind, but it isn’t those. Killer features continue to appear in software that confer such competitive advantage that procrastination is impossible. Of course, it’s only a killer feature if you need it and our application really, really needs it.

The “it” in question here is the ability to handle spatial data. SQL Server 2008 has it. End of story. Yes, I know Oracle had spatial data types first, but are there other, associated, reasons such as the business intelligence capabilities that made SQL Server 2008 the obvious choice for us.

OK, but why Windows and Visual Studio 2008 as well? Don’t think we didn’t think long and hard about this. But, while the decision adds to the workload now, it should reduce it in the future. And if we don’t, we will spend the next two years sailing the sea of uncertain upgrades, dreading the support calls that start with “What OS are you running that on? Ah, well, if only you were running on…”

Having made the decision for all the right reasons, it would be disingenuous to pretend that we aren’t looking forward to the challenge. I believe the conservatism discussed above is essentially forced upon DBAs by commercial considerations. In truth if we aren’t excited by challenges, if we don’t like problem solving, what are we doing working in computing?

One gets the impression that Mr. Whitehorn might be a bit of a one trick pony - someone whose Microsoft related skills outweigh his responsibilities to his employer - if only because he doesn’t seem to know that the facilities he needs were available on Ingres for BSD in 1981 and, in more advanced form, via Postgres on Linux or Solaris now.

SQL-Server, of course, isn’t the only component of this stack to rediscover things that have been more or less standard on Unix for decades. I wasted a couple of hours reading excited reviews of the various betas written by Microsoft “enthusiasts” hyping this stuff for all they’re worth - but came away utterly astounded that so much of what I’ve been taking for granted for years, even decades, is brand new to them.

Consider, for example, these excerpts from the installation section of an October 25, 2007 Windows server 2008 review by Daniel Schuhmann:

Using Vista’s installation routine is a major benefit, especially for a server OS. Administrators can partition the system’s hard drives during setup. More importantly, they can install the necessary AHCI or RAID storage drivers from a CD/DVD or even a USB thumb drive. Thus, error-prone floppies can finally be sent to their well-earned retirement.

…

There is another change that comes with the new setup routine as well. The admin can now choose between the (default) full installation or only selecting core components to install.

You can also install the server without a graphical-user interface.

…

The installation process does not ask the user for an administrator password. Instead, the operating system asks for a new password when it starts up for the first time.

…

After entering the new password, the user reaches the Windows desktop where he is greeted by an assistant for the initial server configuration.

All of this, of course, was pioneered in Unix during the late 80s and early 90s with both HP (SAM) and IBM (Smit) taking the Microsoft sequence while Sun and most others preferred to collect some of the data early, boot from the new installation, and then finish configuration.

There’s a lot more blast from the past stuff too. For example, here’s part of what Schumann has to say about IPv6:

Windows Server 2008 offers complete support for IPv6 and all of its features out of the box. No additional installation or configuration is necessary. Windows Vista also contains a complete IPv6 stack, allowing these two operating systems to communicate via IPv6.

Again, this is Microsoft rapidly catching up to the mid 90s.

The overall picture looks about like that: where there are new features for Microsoft, they’re old for the rest of us - better RAID control and packet management for example than Windows 2003 server but barely on par with Solaris 2.5.1.

There are two exceptions that I know of. The first of these involves virtualization where the new server includes stuff previously licensed separately and Microsoft has chosen to pursue the old IBM VM agenda from the late sixties instead of the BSD jails and Solaris zones ideas developed for Unix. The reason for that, however, is force majeur: the VMS derived registery cannot handle multiple applications needing different values of the same variables, and that forced Microsoft down the OS ghosting route.

The other exception is that Microsoft is continuing its effort to embrace and thus redefine terms for functionality it can’t match - in this case, the the administrative and rights focused Unix idea of role management. Consider this last bit from Schumann:

Windows Server 2008 definitely makes managing the server much easier. To demonstrate this, let us take a look at how you add a server role - in this case File Services.

Clicking Add Roles launches the wizard for installing server services, which begins by informing the administrator that certain prerequisites need to be met before the server can be configured for a new role.

That’s not what “role” means - but the typical bid compliance officer seeing that the Microsoft sales team has checked “Supports administrative role management” as “Yes” isn’t going to know better - just as Whitehorn and thousands like him don’t see how utterly derivative and second rate the whole 2008 stack seems to be.

Last week’s speculation that MacOS X might be eating Linux’s desktop lunch started a discussion about ease of use which included this comment by kd5auq:

“Windows did, and still does, a lot of hand-holding.”

This statement is confusing in the context of what the article says about “things being so easy on an Apple” and Windows requiring constant attention.

To which I offered this response - on which I now want to elaborate:

Part of that is a difference in philosophy

MacOS is Unix and therefore largely about running applications. i.e. it gets out of the way so you can run the app.

Windows (like VMS) is often largely about the OS - i.e. a lot of apparent application functionality is actually part of the OS and that’s useful for kiddie coders but means that the OS gets in its own way when running multiple app[s], and gets in the [way] for users who just want their app to work and could care less about OS doodads and gimmicks.

As frequent contributor Richard Flude pointed out later in the discussion, Microsoft’s market control among lightweight developers is really about the Win32 API - because the libraries and integrated application support functions are what make it possible to build simple applications by stringing together calls to a standardized set of what amount to pattern objects embedded in the OS.

On the surface this design philosophy has been good for Microsoft and its developer community by making development easy and offering highly standardized “hand-holding” tools for both developers and their application users. Look more deeply, however, and the unintended consequences seem likely to outweigh the benefits.

The biggest effect is bloat - the Vista client, for example, now contains about 55 million lines of code, almost an order of magnitude more than Linux. That has consequences including obvious ones like enormous maintenance costs and high development risk, subtle ones like Microsoft’s inability to surmount its own history of x86 optimization, and national ones like those arising from the sequestration and destruction of real development talent in Microsoft’s Windows development pool.

It also has some middle of the road consequences - and one of those is directly pertinent to this business of hand holding. Quite a long time ago, in the late 1970s and early 80s, there was considerable debate about what constituted user friendliness and appropriate levels of hand holding. On the Unix side of this what evolved was confirmation of an earlier design decision to have the computer treat the user the way people want their friends to treat them: with an assumption of mutual trust and competent support - and applications were therefore designed to assume that the user has a clue and do whatever the users want.

The first Star and later LISA OSes attempted to implement the same idea in a click and point environment. At the time, however, processor scale and graphics capabilities limited what could be done and compromises were therefore made - with the most generic being the use of pop-ups to query users for decisions where in fact the computer already had the information needed to make the decision but lacked the processing power or other resources needed to do so while continuing to run the OS, the application, and background tasks like printing.

As a result, by the time various PC companies like Digital Research and IBM started experimenting with GUIs for the PC the popup was a well established defining characteristic for user hand holding; and, particularly because they had even more stringent hardware limitations to work within, these quickly became an accepted and expected part of the Microsoft PC tradition.

Apple’s MacOS has moved away from unnecessary user interrogation with every new hardware/OS generation - and Unix, of course, never went this way. So today MacOS X just automatically does a lot of things for which Windows pops up user queries - and so one key reason things look so easy on the Mac is just that the computer does them, and conversely, the reason Windows demands so much attention is that the use of popups has bloated right along with everything else.

Ultimately, both versions of this - “hand-holding” expressed via pop-ups versus just having the machine do it, and empowering simple development at the resource and functionality cost of more ambitious efforts - just reflect originator philosophy. To Apple and the Unix community an OS is software intended to make hardware useful for running applications - for Microsoft it’s a sales tool aimed at recruiting and holding a majority market share by catering to the (rather bloated) left side of the normal curve on skills, ethics, and technology.

As regular readers know one of the big problems I see IT management facing every single day is the inability to identify and correct the misinformation senior executives pick up from the media and then unconsciously rely on to override our carefully researched and thought through recommendations.

Your boss may, for example, frown on a MySQL deployment on Solaris in part because Forbes has just told him that Sun is new to this business. But here’s the problem: even if you know that he’s wrong, and you know what he’s wrong about, and you know the source of his misinformation, you still won’t be able to do anything about it because in his eyes you’re a concerned party with an agenda and Forbes isn’t.

Basically it’s a catch 22: he’s making a bad decision largely because he’s been misled, but if you try to correct the mistakes underlying his thinking he’ll generally prefer reducing his faith in you to questioning the source of the mis-information.

The root cause of this is a human drive that’s more powerful than sex: it’s the urge to submerge: to form an us; the drive to form communities whose membership separates “us” from “them”. Technically shallow but pretentious magazines like Forbes cater to this by getting your boss to believe that preferring their judgment to yours makes him a member of the business elite - and your attempts to educate him will rebound against you precisely because his commitment to that us forces him to categorize anyone questioning anything bound to that grouping as “them.”

We do exactly the same thing among ourselves. Ever listen to a couple of junior suits talk to group outsiders during the run up to a serious meeting? Behind the desperate search for commonalities: whether couched in terms of loyalties to sports teams, the horrors of traffic, or problems with laptops, the real message they’re exchanging is always the same: “I’m like you, not them” or, more cynically, “Trust me, I’m an idiot too.”

It also spills over in both direct and subtle ways into the stuff we read and trust. Consider, for example, this bit of lusty cheering for data processing’s recent successes in taking control of corporate IT back to the nineteen sixties:

MacBook Air could increase risk of laptop loss

By: Briony Smith

ComputerWorld Canada (17 Jan 2008)

While the form factor of Apple’s MacBook Air caught the industry’s attention this week, experts say Canada’s many Windows shops might not want them, and those that do might encounter another year full of dangerous data breaches and IT manager headaches.

According to Eddie Chan, an analyst with the Toronto-based research firm IDC Canada, of Apple portable computers that were shipped in 2006, fewer than one per cent made it into the large business (500-plus seats) space. First-quarter through third-quarter results from 2007 show the number sinking even lower, with only 0.4 per cent representing enterprise purchases. “The market is pretty much non-existent”, said Chan. “It’s a PC world.”

On the surface the claim being made here is that you can avoid “another year full of dangerous data breaches and IT manager headaches” simply by not buying Apple’s MacBook Air. Having put this nonsense into the reader’s mind the author then changes the subject and laces the new material with emotional subliminals whose effect is to coerce belief by inviting the reader to join his us and stand united against “them” and their unholy Mac.

He does this first by simultaneously invoking group membership and therefore group credibility. Thus the otherwise irrelevant note that the analyst he quotes is employed by a Toronto firm is intended first to appeal to regional chauvinism and thereby establish that the analyst cheers for the right team. Next he builds the analyst’s credibility first by quoting impossibly precise numbers: a “0.4 percent” market share and secondly by tying in another appeal to group membership - only “large business” or “enterprise” purchases count.

This would, I think, have been a perfect example of authorial misdirection if he hadn’t gone somewhat over the top in the next bit: repeatedly invoking the power of us to reinforce his anti-mac message: “experts say… It’s a PC world” while emphasizing the puniness of the “pretty much non-existent” “them.”

To see this in a longer term context, look at his key point: that you can avoid “another year full of dangerous data breaches and IT manager headaches” by not buying a Mac Air in the context of what happened with the MacXL back in 1984. At the time the PC-AT outsold the Mac by a factor of about 40 mainly because the data processing people in control of corporate IT budgets bought only from each other despite the fact that the IBM PC cost more, lacked software, and was three to five years behind Apple on both hardware and software.

Back then, for data processing, IBM was part of the us - and Apple was “them”. For Briony Smith that situation hasn’t changed: Apple is “them”, the PC is us, and the facts have nothing to do with membership. To misquote the macalope who said something like this in this same context what you’re hearing in this review is the 1984 data processing community vocally tarring and feathering a product for 2009. That’s the data processing us at work - and the problem isn’t that it hasn’t advanced since the mid 1920s, the problem is that this is the other voice your boss hears in his head at night.

This is the third excerpt from the first book in the Defen series: The Board Member’s IT
Brief.

From 1.3 Information Integrity

1.3.1 One term, many meanings

When PC people not yet merged into the data processing culture talk about “information integrity” they’re generally using the phrase as a $10 replacement for the word “security” - itself a term that has a unique meaning in their segment of the IT industry. Specifically, the PC community has a long history of susceptibility to data theft and software failure, either caused internally or through an outside agent such as a thief or a network hacker. As a result “security” to them refers mainly to measures taken to counter or diminish such attacks.

Thus PC software intended to prevent thieves from recovering data on stolen gear, to keep hackers out of networks, or to scan incoming e-mail for attack code is all described as “security” software in private and often as part of an “information integrity assurance” program in meetings with bosses.

In the IBM mainframe and Unix environments, where PC style security concerns are largely a non issue, “security” usually refers to physical security - ensuring that locked doors are locked, authorized accesses are actually authorized, and that back up tapes are made but not lost.

Although people from each of IT communities will sometimes use the term “information integrity” when considering compliance issues such as those associated with the American Sarbanes-Oxley act or, more recently, the civil discovery rules, this isn’t (yet) very common. Instead these issues tend to be discussed as compliance or audit rules with some linkage to the “security” concept in the data processing and Unix worlds, but very little of that occurring yet in the hobbyist part of the PC world.

1.3.2 “The real deal” is found in Shannon’s Model

In general use the term “information integrity” refers to the accuracy and completeness of information. In the specific context of accounting and other management uses of the term, however, the twin concepts of timeliness and authorization modify these basic elements of information integrity.

Thus an information system –including all automation, people, and any required manual procedures and organizational structures– demonstrates information integrity if and only if its outputs fully and fairly reflect its inputs and do so in a timely manner without allowing unauthorized access.

Almost everything known about information integrity derives from work done by Claude Shannon at AT&T Bell Laboratories in the nineteen thirties and forties.

We can easily and directly map Shannon’s general model to the extensive body of research on information integrity in automated and communications systems with direct reference to common sources of “integrity impairment” opportunities -i.e. systems and processes in which things often go wrong - including:

• Data collection and entry systems;
• Communications;
• Database management;
• Processing and related support software;
• Reporting, abstraction, and summarization systems; and,
• Information distribution and usage.

Click for diagram (PDF)

In Shannon’s formulation, each impairment opportunity is modeled in terms of a probability distribution that, in use, allows us to answer the question: what is the likelihood that source data will be fully and correctly reflected only in the messages arriving at the destination with no unauthorized delay, copying, additions or deletions?

This formulation allows us to ask the obvious management questions:

• what are the costs and benefits of risk reduction for each source of risk?
• who is directly responsible for risk assessment and remediation? and,
• how lossy (likely to lose accessibility, control of data, accuracy, or completeness) is the overall (combined) process over longer periods of time?

It is therefore possible to model the cost of meeting specific information integrity requirements such as those mandated in any standard CFO job description (or the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation) using exactly the same process as you would for any other business investment decision: quantify the risks, assess the probabilities, work out an expected net cost of loss, compare that to the expected cost of remediation, and make the indicated decision.

An Example

Suppose the ICell Company uses an e-commerce application of significant importance to its revenues. Suppose further that a single ten hour database shutdown is expected to cost ICell one million dollars on net and it is known that competitors using the same computing technology suffer, on average, two such outages a year.

In other words the undiscounted expected annual cost of failure is two million dollars. Now suppose that replacing the people and technologies in place with a more reliable combination, one expected to fail no more than once every two years, would cost $500,000 initially and no more to use than the existing technology.

In this example the alternate technology reduces the expected annual cost of failure from $2,000,000 to about $500,000 without increasing operating cost - making the decision a no brainer, but in other cases you may need to look at the expected cash flows in some detail before making a decision.

Some notes:

1. These excerpts don’t include footnotes and most illustrations have been dropped as simply too hard to insert correctly. (The wordpress html “editor” as used here enables a limited html subset and is implemented to force frustrations like the CPM line delimiters from MS-DOS).

2. The feedback I’m looking for is what you guys do best: call me on mistakes, add thoughts/corrections on stuff I’ve missed or gotten wrong, and generally help make the thing better.

Here’s a comment from not so frequent contributor “SO.CAL Guy”:

murph_z you should be the last person calling someone a zealot. your the biggest zealot on zdnet. your blog is near the bottom of the list for a reason.

you don’t write about anything that someone would want to read about. every post i’ve ever read of yours which i have to admit is not many. you are ether calling everyone who does not hold your beliefs about software stupid. or calling anyone who uses windows a moron and post a link to try and back up your uninformed ideas about what stupid is. i could go on and on but i won’t.

heres some advice write about tech the good or bad. not about how everyone but you is a dumbass and should be overjoyed that you would give us a few words from your all knowing intellect.

just food for thought.

Umm, the zdnet blog technical (i.e. non SCO related) comment I’ve been most reviled for came from my February 2006 prediction that just multiplying out the per thread megahertz for both Xeon and Sun’s then pending T1 UltraSparc would provide a reasonable guide to relative performance. Thus my conclusion at the time was that “it would take somewhat more than eight 3.2Ghz Intel Xeons to match one UltraSPARC T1 at 1.2Ghz”.

As I noted nearly a year later, this idea didn’t exactly get rave reviews:

Once upon a time, and in a lab far far away, there was a little machine rejoicing in the name of “atchewi”. Atchewi lived for throughput, and as a result I started predicting that a single 1.4Ghz UltraSPARC T1 would offer rough performance equivalence, for non floating point intensive tasks, to a hypothetical 44.8Ghz Xeon -and people pretty much unanimously thought I was nuts.

…

When Sun started selling the machine they offered it with four, six, or eight working cores running at either 1 or 1.2 Ghz, so I was wrong about the clock rate - but multiple benchmarks carried out by customers around the world have shown that the T1’s performance does indeed roughly match Xeon on a cycles per thread basis - i.e. that a 1Ghz, four core, T1 offers roughly a 16Ghz Xeon equivelance (provided there’s no floating point component) while an eight core, 1.2Ghz “Coolthreads” system runs some jobs at very nearly the rate you’d expect from a hypothetical 38.4Ghz Xeon.

Not that many people bought into this then either; but, as regular readers know, I’m not that easily persuaded of the error of my ways, and went on to dig the hole deeper:

Today [Dec 11/2006] what I want to do is venture another absurd prediction: that the floating point performance for the forthcoming second Niagara generation will be as much a surprise to the general IT community as the T1’s character pushing performance has been. Specifically I think it will perform about like a T1 on workloads with very many small jobs, do about a third better on workloads requiring more extensive processing, and astonish everyone by showing no significant drop in throughput as active threads become increasingly floating point intensive.

The reason for that goes far beyond the addition of seven floating point cores: with Niagara2 Sun puts more of the machine on the chip -memory controllers, dual 10Gb/s networking, hardware cryptology. Combine the hardware with Solaris/ZFS and what you get is a recipe for world-beating RDBMS performance.

At the time, this prediction was considered so over the top that even Sun’s president Jonathan Schwartz evinced some wry cynicism about it in his blog

The first reaction most folks have to the performance is, frankly, disbelief. A while back I got into a spat with the technologists that built the machine about whether we could fairly call them 9.6Ghz machines (as a measure of clock frequency of the chip). Paul Murphy has an interesting analysis of whether that’s a fair descriptor (I say interesting because he says we’re underhyping the performance - a first for the industry!).

So now, of course, here it is January 2008, the machines are widely available, and it’s possible to check the prediction against reality.

Luckily for me, it’s been a bit of a no brainer -as these benchmark results show relatively low end Niagara machines rather easily beat eight Xeon cores pretty much across the board - it’s even 14% faster on SPEC’s IntRate_2006 throughput than Intel’s latest and greatest Quad-Core “Xenia” X5460 (3.16GHz 1333MHz 12MB 120W) in an HP DL360 G5.

Basically the only benchmarks it doesn’t own are the ones Sun hasn’t had a chance to post a result for yet.

Some benchmark results, however, are more interesting than others. Consider, for example, a workload bracketing pair starting with an LDAP benchmark reported on the Sun directory manager blog.

From the introduction:

Sun T2000 vs Dell 6850 Revisited

Last month, I wrote about a demo that we presented in Austin comparing LDAP authentication performance on the Sun Fire T2000 server (one UltraSPARC® T1 processor at 1.0 GHz and 32GB DDR2 memory) with that of the Dell PowerEdge 6850 server (four dual-core Intel® Xeon® EM64T processors at 3.2GHz and 32GB DDR2 memory), which is about the best that Dell has to offer. You can read that post for the details, but in short the Sun server (which is cheaper, smaller, and consumes a lot less power than the Dell system) won the race pretty handily.

And four sample entries from his extended results summary:

System Type	Operating System	Number of User Entries	Average LDAP Authentications per Second
Dell PowerEdge 6850	Windows	250,000	2,984
Dell PowerEdge 6850	Solaris	250,000	4,375
Dell PowerEdge 6850	Solaris	10,000,000	2,800
SunFire T2000	Solaris	10,000,000	4,457

Notice first that the Xeon did more than a third better under Solaris than under Windows, and second that the 1Ghz T2000 (1ghz x 32 threads =32 (Xeon) Ghz?) did about twice the work the Dell did with eight Xeon cores at 3.2Ghz (=25.6 (Xeon) Ghz).

The second half of the pair is a recent result for the second generation T2 reported by Phil Harmon under the title Niagara 2 memory throughput according to libMicro.

He provides a technical discussion plus pointers to the benchmark source, but the bottom line comes in a comparison showing a full T2 (8 cores, 1.4Ghz) maintaining 267 million memory reads per second - 3.1 times the 86 million achieved by a four socket (16 core?) Intel “Tigerton” at 2.93Ghz.

These two results nicely exceed my early prediction - and bracket both Niagara generations and workload characteristics.

These results seem to hold across the board - look at a broad variety of business and academic benchmarks and you see both Niagara generations blowing everything else away on metrics like SWaP while beating from four to sixteen Xeon cores, depending on configuration and workload, on typical business tasks.

So what’s my bottom line? Well So.Cal Guy, zealots are by definition always wrong - and the one claim I’ve received the most criticism on, pretty much worked out - so, sure, I love you too: but next time? maybe you should do some homework before spouting off - ok?

One side effect of Linux marketing by Red Hat and others has been the widespread belief that people transitioning from expensive old Unix servers running on proprietary chipsets to Linux on x86 do so mainly to get Linux. I don’t believe that; on the contrary I think that most people assume x86 based hardware and then choose among available operating systems capable of running their applications mainly on cash cost, old antagonisms, recent disappointments, and their beliefs about how others will view each choice.

The x86 assumption works at the hardware level because the cost of everyone’s hardware has come down much faster than the jobs have grown - basically a job that required a half million dollar Sun or HP machine in 1997 can now be done on a dual Xeon for less than three thousand bucks, including storage. Add the misconception that x86 is somehow a non proprietary industry standard along with the easy availability of good software for Linux, and what you get is what we see: ever increasing corporate commitments to Linux on x86.

Personally I think that’s great - but Red Hat’s corollary about Linux eating Sun’s lunch leads the phenomena more than it describes it: the anti-Sun stuff is a marketing strategy aimed at slotting the credulous into a process that leads to a Linux decision by reinforcing the anachronistic comparison between late nineties server costs and today’s x86 costs.

With that in mind I want to venture a total speculation: that the same forces have created a situation in which MacOS really has started to eat the Linux desktop lunch.

Be aware, however, that this is purely speculative at this point - there’s no evidence yet, just my interpretation of the fact that I keep running into more and more comments along the lines of this extended extract from Tim Bray’s “Ongoing” blog:

This is the second of five predictions for 2008, expanded from the short form generated on short notice as described here.

Prediction · The short version: ¶

The strain due to the fact that most business desktops are locked into the Microsoft platform, at a time when both the Apple and GNU/Linux alternatives are qualitatively safer, better, and cheaper to operate, will start to become impossible to ignore.

Experience · Around our house, we have screens connected to Windows XP, OS X, and Ubuntu GNU/Linux. Ubuntu and OS X are easier to install, less trouble to maintain, and more pleasant to use. If we were tracking the time we spend maintaining these things, I’m willing to bet that Windows takes more care & feeding than the other two put together. Down the road we’ll have Windows only for games, I think. ¶

We also provide tech support for our mothers, a local Pilates studio, and various random friends, local and remote. Wherever we can, we’re steering them to OS X just because they’ll experience less pain and be more productive.

Pain · These days, when you live mostly on OS X & Ubuntu, XP is just incredibly irritating. There’s always something pestering you to update it: Adobe, Java, Norton, whatever. Plus random other whining from the bottom right corner of the screen, about unused icons and firewall security and so on. ¶

As for my family & friends who aren’t pros, and who haven’t been under the tutelage of one either, their Windows boxes are mostly smoking, diseased, quivering heaps of goo. Who’s got the time to deal with that shit?

Why I Might Be Wrong · I haven’t spent any time with Vista. Possibly, after a couple of releases, it’ll make Windows competitive again. ¶

From the Business Point of View · I talk to the individuals and small businesses who are still running Windows, and I compare them to those who’ve escaped, and it’s just not close. Recently I was helping Mairin get her system set up a Mac mini, which BTW is a fabulous computer for a small business and was showing her how to do something and she said “But that’s so easy? Why?” and I said “Well, that’s how things work on this system” and she said “Well, why are people still using Windows then?” ¶

What I think is happening is a spill over effect of the x86 assumption as people whose beliefs about hardware both led them to Linux and prevented them from seeing Apple’s value in the PPC days are now comparing the two desktops - and not just finding in favor of MacOS X but influencing others to that same choice too.

So if true, is this a good thing? I think it could be: I think x86 scale change coupled with the emergence of Linux as a smart data center choice helped drive the renewal at Sun - and it’s possible to hope that the same thing happens to the Linux desktop community as MacOS X eats its market share.

And the $64K question: where’s Microsoft in this? It’s been obvious for some time that they’ve reached the limits of what can be built on the old VMS framework - and correspondingly that their options are to invent something new or switch to Unix in the same way that Apple did. Emotion aside, that’s a no brainer - their “something new” isn’t working while OpenBSD networks nicely on the Xenon.

Every once in a while you run into a comment that just begs for wider application. Take a look, for example, at this bit from Glyn Holton’s “Best of 2007 Book Awards”:

One embarrassing trend that has gained steam this year is that of authors who previously published successful technical finance books repackaging themselves as financial gurus and writing more populist books. This genre was launched by Nassim Taleb who published an outstanding technical book, Dynamic Hedging, about derivatives trading back in 1996. He followed that up with a pretentious book, Fooled By Randomness, that appealed to the high-school dropout, weekend trader crowd. It was a bestseller. As confirmation of how much notoriety and connections can accomplish, this year he released another pseudo-philosophical trader book: Black Swan. It is as shallow and as successful as the last book. It was even named one of BusinessWeek’s top finance books for the year. Don’t get me started on the state of financial journalism today …

Well, a challenge made is a debt unpaid, right? So let me illustrate Holton’s comment by quoting from the top publication in “financial journalism” for the MBA crowd: Forbes Magazine. Specifically, the opening paragraph from Andy Greenberg’s January 16, 2008 piece titled Sun Snaps Up Database Firm, MySQL:

Sun Microsystems elbowed into the enterprise database market Wednesday with the announcement of a proposed $1 billion acquisition of MySQL, an open-source database software company. The deal, which Sun Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz calls the “most important acquisition in the company’s history,” makes Sun one of the first major public companies to offer open-source software and puts the company head to head with the three big vendors in the $15 billion database market: IBM, SAP, and its former database partner, Oracle.

What did Browning say in a somewhat different context? Let me count the errors?

1. The first sentence explicitly makes the claim that Sun is just now entering the database market, implicitly suggests that Sun will focus on product rather than the customer, and over simplifies MySQL’s open source structure.

   Sun’s purpose here is to allow MySQL to continue developing for Solaris and Linux without undue influence from Red Hat and IBM and their acquisition strategy therefore focuses on selling customer support - something Sun has done for years, and not on database product development. What Greenberg does here reverses history while mis-stating both the nature of the deal and the strategic drivers behind it.

2. The second sentence claims that the acquisition “makes Sun one of the first major public companies to offer open-source software”. Given that Forbes is pretty much the journal of record for MBAs and “the high-school dropout, weekend trader crowd”, the depth of ignorance revealed here: about Sun, about open source, and about information technology in general, is enough to leave almost anyone speechless.

   Luckily, however, I can quote Ashley Vance to set the record straight - here’s a bit from his register report on the deal:

   Go big picture, and you find Sun’s massive open source claims legitimized. We’re talking about the company that funds OpenOffice, that sells the very popular Lustre file system, that will own the most popular open source database and that provides some of the world’s most sophisticated open source operating system code. I’m trying to think of a larger, proper open source company and am struggling.

   In this context, can those folks out there that hate Solaris because of its proprietary past keep up the anger? Is SAMP any less genuine as an open source stack than LAMP? I don’t think so.

   (Emotional aside: Dear god, how did Red Hat let this happen? It could have solidified its place as the center of the open source universe and gained permanent leverage over the ever crucial database layer. Instead, it allowed another operating system vendor to grab the database running on most Red Hat servers. Yikes.)

3. The second chunk from Greenberg’s last sentence goes like this: [the purchase] “puts the company head to head with the three big vendors in the $15 billion database market: IBM, SAP, and its former database partner, Oracle.”

   In reality the current “big three” enterprise database licensers are Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle - but Greenberg’s reference to SAP isn’t just wrong, it’s another reality reversal.

   SAP sells mainly on Oracle, DB2, and SQL-Server but does market a database product of its own. Now called MaxDB this is not a competitive negative for Sun, but part of what Sun bought because it’s still mostly a co-branded MySQL product - with 10,000 or so heavyweight corporate users around the world.

4. The snide reference to Oracle as Sun’s “former database partner” is wrong too - and again in two major ways. First it’s strategically wrong because Sun is interested in selling services, not licenses, and more subtly it’s wrong because Oracle’s involvement with products like Innobase signal’s Oracle’s view of MySQL as a net positive long term contributor to Oracle’s long term success.

In summary pretty much everything Greenberg says here is filtered through a soul deep mask of ignorance - but our problem is that a lot of our bosses are in his audience - and I don’t expect Forbes to be publishing corrections any time soon.

What this means for us, therefore, is simply this: when the boss makes an untelligible decision, the chances are good that he’s been influenced by people like Greenberg - but you won’t know who; you won’t know when; you won’t know any more than the boss does what mistaken beliefs are driving him; and, most importantly anything you say to correct the record will count against you because Forbes you know, is a credible and independent source.

In Canada the unwritten law for journalists is that you can’t refer to a forecast issued by the Conference Board of Canada without calling them well respected or otherwise extolling their virtues as forecasters. Their actual record as forecasters, however, is remarkable only for being consistently worse than, say, communist China’s record on human rights and environmental protection.

In the IT press something similar seems to apply to some highly placed pundits whose pronouncements are always eagerly awaited, widely quoted, and dead wrong.

Take, for example, Robert Cringley on Apple.

A simple google search for references to Apple on his PBS pulpit site turned up 414 hits this morning (01/20/08). The latest of these includes this pre MacWorld 2008 bit on Apple taking over Adobe:

What I DO see happening is Apple buying Adobe, which would give it effective dominance of digital content creation and distribution on a global scale. Bruce Chizen suddenly stepped down as Adobe’s CEO without warning: why? A caretaker CEO (my characterization — no slight intended) is in place. Steve has always viewed Adobe co-founder and co-chair John Warnock like a father. Warnock and co-chair Chuck Geschke are losing interest in Adobe day-to-day as they move on with their lives. Acquiring Adobe would make Apple much more of a cross-platform company. The combined professional applications could be placed in the Adobe division of Apple where they could go up in price for some markets, becoming VASTLY more profitable. But most important — keeping in mind the whole purpose here is driving content distribution — merging Flash and QuickTime would make any other video standards (like Windows Media) simply immaterial.

It’s not impossible that this could happen - but it didn’t get announced at last week’s MacWorld and I personally don’t think it ever will.

Lets look, however, at Cringley’s older predictions about Apple to see how much real credence this one should get. Has he been right often enough to matter as a credible forecaster?

The second hit on that google search turns up Cringley’s June 2005 reaction to Apple’s Intel announcement:

Intel is fed up with Microsoft. Microsoft has no innovation that drives what Intel must have, which is a use for more processing power. And when they did have one with the Xbox, they went elsewhere.

So Intel buys Apple and works with their OEMs to get products out in the market. The OEMs would love to be able to offer a higher margin product with better reliability than Microsoft. Intel/Apple enters the market just as Microsoft announces yet another delay in their next generation OS. By the way, the new Apple OS for the Intel Architecture has a compatibility mode with Windows (I’m just guessing on this one).

This scenario works well for everyone except Microsoft. If Intel was able to own the Mac OS and make it available to all the OEMs, it could break the back of Microsoft. And if they tuned the OS to take advantage of unique features that only Intel had, they would put AMD back in the box, too. Apple could return Intel to its traditional role of being where all the value was in the PC world. And Apple/Intel could easily extend this to the consumer electronics world. How much would it cost Intel to buy Apple? Not much. And if they paid in stock it would cost nothing at all since investors would drive shares through the roof on a huge swell of user enthusiasm.

That’s the story as I see it unfolding. Steve Jobs finally beats Bill Gates. And with the sale of Apple to Intel, Steve accepts the position of CEO of the Pixar/Disney/Sony Media Company.

It’s possible to argue that the jury’s still out on that too, but it didn’t look credible then and its not looking any better now.

Hit number three is from November 2007 and about AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson shooting off his mouth on faster iPhone connectivity. Here’s the hot bit:

I don’t think Stephenson’s statement was by accident and I don’t think he is out of touch with reality. I think, instead, he was sending a $1 billion message to Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

It is no coincidence that Stephenson made his remarks in Silicon Valley, rather than in San Antonio or New York. He came to the turf of his “partner” and delivered a message that will hurt Apple as much as AT&T, a message that says AT&T doesn’t really need Apple despite the iPhone’s success.

It’s one thing to have a private disagreement between companies but quite another to take it public in a way that costs real money.

What I believe is troubling the relationship between AT&T and Apple is the upcoming auction for 700-MHz wireless spectrum and AT&T’s discovery that — as I have predicted for weeks — Apple will be joining Google in bidding. AT&T thought its five-year “exclusive” iPhone agreement with Apple would have precluded such a bid, but that just shows how poorly Randall Stephenson understood Steve Jobs. Steve always hurts his friends to see how much they really love him, so AT&T probably should have expected this kind of corporate body blow.

This doesn’t look good either - Apple is not on the FCC list of bidders nor (at least to my knowledge?) has a formal U.S. market partnership with anyone other than AT&T been confirmed.

Hit number four is from March 2007 and contains these bits:

Now comes the rumor I have heard, that I believe to be a fact, that has simply yet to be confirmed. I have heard that Apple plans to add hardware video decoding to ALL of its new computers beginning fairly soon, certainly this year.

…

So what’s in it for Apple? Potentially a lot, because the chip Apple has chosen doesn’t cost $7, it costs more like $50, and it doesn’t just do hardware H.264 decoding, it does hardware H.264 ENCODING, too.

This will change everything. Soon even the lowliest Mac will be able to effortlessly record in background one or more video signals while the user runs TurboTax on the screen. Macs will become superb DVR machines with TiVo-like functionality yet smaller file sizes than any TiVo box could ever produce. In a YouTube world, the new Macs will be a boon to user-produced video, which will, in turn, promote the H.264 standard. By being able to encode in real time, the new Macs will have that American Idol clip up and running faster than could be done on almost any other machine. Add in Slingbox-like capability to throw your home cable signal around the world and it gets even better. Add faster video performance to the already best-of-league iChat audio/video chat client, and every new Mac becomes a webcam or a video phone.

It’s an aggressive play that fits perfectly with Apple’s traditional role as the hardware platform of choice for new media development. And I am sure the company will have at least one new service or application that will uniquely support this new chip upon which Apple is placing a $500+ million bet.

Remember, you read it here first.

The notion that Apple would get fast H.264 services by adding a custom chip to what’s now a PC motherboard is so incredibily naive and uninformed about both hardware and software that it’s breathtaking - and, of course, wrong.

Hit number five is from April 2006 and previews the first one noted aboves. Three key bits:

Over the past three weeks, we’ve laid out in this column a sequence of clues and events that suggest Apple is planning to next year take on not only Microsoft’s hardware OEMs, but also possibly Microsoft, itself, by leveraging a vestigial legal right to some portion of the Windows API — in this case, literally the Windows XP API. This bold strategy is based on the high probability that — if something called Windows Vista ships at all next January — it will really be Windows XP SP4 with a new name. Microsoft is so bloated and paralyzed that this could happen, but what’s missing is an Apple application strategy to go with this operating system strategy, because Microsoft’s true power lies not in Windows, but in Microsoft Office. Fortunately for Apple, I believe there is an application plan in the works, and I will describe it here.

…

Now here is something interesting: Apple sponsored the ECMA submission of Open XML. Why would they have done that?

Why? Well, once Open XML is a standard, it becomes much harder for Microsoft to change it. By embracing Open XML, Apple could get complete file compatibility with the new Office format. Now if Apple’s old cross-licensing deal with Microsoft also gives them compatibility with the older binary Office formats, it could give them something not even Microsoft has at the moment — support for ALL Microsoft Office formats, past, present, and future.

Such compatibility would be the killer app component in that native Quartz version of OpenOffice I am sure Apple has had idling in the lab just in case Microsoft pulls the plug on Mac Office. Throw in FileMaker as an Access-killer, and they’ll really have something.

…

Steve wants Windows applications to run like crazy on his hybrid platform but to look like crap. In his heart of hearts, he’d still like to beat Microsoft on the merits, not just by leveraging some clever loophole. So he needs the top ISVs who are currently writing for OS X to continue writing for OS X, and that especially means Adobe.

There’s only one way to make that happen for sure, and that’s for Apple to buy Adobe.

Apple has the stock, they have the cash — such a purchase would effectively cost Apple nothing, the market would like it so well. The Feds would allow it because this current bunch of Feds allows just about anything (just look at Oracle). Efficiencies would abound. For example, Adobe’s Premiere editing program could go away in favor of Final Cut Pro. Apple’s Aperture photo touch-up program could die so PhotoShop could reign supreme.

The “buy Adobe” part of this is what he repeated recently, notice however that everything else has now been dropped - so while it’s possible to argue that the key result isn’t it yet, we’re definitely still waiting.

I could keep going down the list but it’s pretty clear that, at least with respect to Apple, he didn’t earn a publically funded pulpit at PBS on the basis of his ability to forecast technology industry change.

Two Notes:

1. I picked on Cringley here, but I checked out a few others - from Scobie to Dvorak and Enderle the record is the same: the ability to write simply about technology coupled with relentless self promotion seems to yield both credibility and a horrifically bad record of indefensible pronouncements coupled with wrong or indeterminate projections no one ever quite gets around to reviewing.

2. I’m going to have to learn to write more simply ..um.. and maybe issue a few “press backgrounders”…