December 4, 2008 by roland.

That must sound rather odd coming from someone who owns a couple of GM vehicles, but it is the truth none the less. GM Must fail and must be allowed to fail. No tax payer dollars must be offered up to save it. Why? GM was behind the root of our economic problems and because of that, must be allowed to fail.

Anyone who has actually read through this blog over the years will correctly agree. GM and EDS were if not the absolute root of IT off shoring, they were damned near it. The management involved at both of these companies was hallucinogenic enough to believe their would still be customers for $70,000 SUVs even after the IT jobs paying more than $100,000 per year were eliminated. There never was a shortage of IT workers, there was only a shortage of management willing to pay the actual market rate.

In their defense, GM and EDS didn’t expect _every_ big company to jump on the off shore bandwagon. It was supposed to be their little secret, until they found out just how much infrastructure had to be built off-shore to make use of that $10/day low quality labor source. Once they found out just how much it would cost, they had to turn to the industry’s largest marketing company, The Gartner Group. Yes, they want you to call them an “Industry Analyst” or “Think Tank” firm, but the only thinking they do is about what they’ve been paid to market. All you have to do is work in IT for about a decade to figure that out. The industry is used to buying what the Gartner Group is paid to sell this week, it has become a regular practice. Little wonder that when Gartner started marketing off shoring as the cure for world hunger, just like they marketed “right sizing” just in front of Y2K, the industry jumped in with both feet. The first domino fell in the economic downturn.

The mortgage fraud could have quietly been swept up as long as there were still people pulling down more than $100,000 per year playing “flip this house” and buying $70,000 SUVs. What hasn’t been widely reported is why the mortgage crisis exploded so dramatically, the group of people whose incomes made it possible were off shored. Once GEG (GM, EDS, and Gartner) took that pool of people out of the housing and car market, the train was sent down the mountain sideways. Nobody noticed the train wreck until those people who had been off shored started cashing in stocks and mutual funds so they could continue to eat and live in doors. The few remaining people in the “flip this house” game then got caught holding onto mortgages they couldn’t cover. More stock and mutual fund liquidations occurred as people tried to avoid total destruction.

Finally, the plight of the U.S. IT worker caused so much money to be pulled out of the financial markets, that it put a squeeze on the financial instruments used to bust up mortgages. With the flippers out of the market, other speculators started defaulting as home prices plateaued, then turned down. The most visible domino then fell. Mortgage backed financial instruments became near worthless and a rash of predatory mortgage practices started being exposed on the evening news.

Congress must not save GM. When you tunnel back through the carnage and feces, you find them very near the root of this problem.

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December 1, 2008 by roland.

The following is an excerpt from “The Minimum You Need to Know About Qt and PostgreSQL”

What is really the fundamental difference between the MAC market and the PC market? Apple has completely tossed out prior architecture on more than one occasion, yet MAC is now the leading college campus computer. Vista required such a massive hardware upgrade for most existing Windows users that most have refused to upgrade. After officially dropping support for Windows XP, Microsoft began selling a “Business Edition” Vista license. I purchased one of these computers for someone. Do you want to know what the “Business Edition” really is? It comes bootable media which will wipe Vista off your machine and install Windows XP Pro. Microsoft counts this as a Vista license sale, but they really just sold another copy of Windows XP Pro.
How is it that the Apple customers are willing to endure this, but the Microsoft customers are not? When Apple throws out the prior technology, they throw it out lock-stock-and-barrel. A major improvement in both the operating system and the hardware shipping with it occurs. There is a compelling reason to ditch the old stuff for the new. Vista was not a major improvement. Microsoft doesn’t control the computer hardware like Apple does. Anyone who has seen any of the “I’m a MAC and I’m a PC” commercials where the PC user was rejoicing about being error free for nearly a week can get a good understanding of just how bad Vista has been. So bad, Microsoft has come up with a new campaign where they won’t even use the name Vista anymore.
Over the course of its existence, Microsoft had managed to compel people and companies to upgrade and stay current with the latest toys. That worked until the PC became a standard office supply. Companies look to spend as little as possible when it comes to standard office supplies. Windows XP pro became successful because it remained virtually unchanged for many years. Companies developed a lot of software for it, and most employees already had some idea of how to check email and surf the Web on it when they were hired. It is a Heritage system. The very thing Microsoft (and most everybody trying to sell something new into IT) rails against, claiming it is holding people and companies back from reaching their full potential. What the marketing types don’t understand is the reasons Heritage systems exist.

1.They are a sunk cost.
2.They do their job.
3.Most companies don’t make money changing software or hardware platforms.

Apple can get away with a complete redesign of their platform because they aren’t found on most office desks. They occupy creative niches at companies and really are still personal machines. The PC targeted the much wider “business tool” market. What Microsoft shareholders and leaders haven’t realized yet is that once a carpenter has a hammer they like, they need an incredibly compelling reason to buy a new one. Vista was not compelling.

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