We know our hosted computing service is a great way to work. All of us at Cloudworks use it every day. But occasionally we get reminded of how truly beneficial Cloudworks really is.
A few weeks ago, our Systems Engineer Niels called from his cell phone telling us he’d lost power to his entire block. Niels is located in Seattle and works on the Cloudworks system like everyone in our main offices.
“It’s ok, I will head down to the nearest coffee shop and work from there” he said. A few minutes later, we get an e-mail from him with the enclosed picture, “at my local coffee shop and back online.” Snazzy jacket too.
I just got a new Blackberry, not because I particularly wanted one, but because I hate my Treo and the Blackberry appears to be the best choice among several mediocre options. The Blackberry replaces my two year old Treo 700w. And although my relationship with my Treo is now irreconcilable, it wasn’t always that way. There was a period of 9 months or so where it was a stable and reliable friend. But it didn’t last. Now it freezes regularly and I have to perform a hard reset at least once daily. I blame a software “upgrade” for most of my recent problems, but truth is, there was trouble before that as well. I never got the Bluetooth to work properly in my car (maybe the car’s fault). It’s a little bigger and heavier than I would like. And the touchscreen is so small my big fingers have trouble navigating the selections. But the main issue, the real problem, is that the Treo’s operating system just isn’t good enough. And there is no excuse for this.
I’m hoping the Blackberry is better. But I already know it comes with a significant downside. The Achilles heal of the Blackberry is that Blackberry Enterprise Server, the system the synchronizes your PDA with your email, calendar and contacts does not support Public Folders in Microsoft Exchange. For this reason alone, many of our customers refuse to buy one. Public Folders are where most organizations store their company contact lists. Not being able to synchronize this information is a deal breaker. Blackberry has claimed for years they are going to address this shortcoming. But apparently they prefer to funnel their resources into lawsuits rather than addressing the needs of their customers. It’s actually a testament to their technology that they can ignore their customers so long and still maintain their market share. Fortunately there is a work around to the Public Folders problem, but it’s cumbersome. I’m about to find out how cumbersome.
Apple’s iPhone certainly wins when it comes to sex appeal. Apple’s ability to create desirable and generally user friendly technology is undisputed. However, their poor support for enterprise computing environments is also undisputed. Currently the iPhone cannot be easily synchronized with corporate mail servers like Microsoft Exchange. But just this week, Apple announced plans to support Exchange synchronization and a commitment to better support for corporate environments. We’ll wait and see if they can deliver on that promise.
Ultimately the failure to deliver on these promises is what keeps each one of these phones from standing out among the crowd. The Treo is unstable and unreliable, the Blackberry delivers most but not all the functionality business customers need and the iPhone looks great, but requires users to sacrifice functionality for fashion. Here’s hoping one of these companies dedicates themselves to their customers and pays a little less attention to their competition.
We were going to go so far as saying IT Sucks. But that didn’t sound professional. On the other hand, it’s not wrong either. Information Technology is fantastic, absolutely essential, and largely responsible for this country’s increase in productivity over the past decade or so. It’s also broken. Information Technology is overly complex, difficult to implement correctly, and expensive to maintain over its short lifespan.
Although one could fill a novel with what’s wrong with Information Technology, nobody would ever read that novel. So here is a brief overview of a few points we think are worth mentioning.
Complexity – Each computer contains parts from thousands of manufacturers. We then install a typical Microsoft operating system with millions of configuration variables, and on top of that, we install dozens of applications, some well developed, others not so much. Now consider that networks are filled with several, dozens, often hundreds of computers, network equipment, peripherals, etc., and soon you can understand what we mean by “overly complex”.
Requires high levels of expertise – Getting dozens of computers to communicate effectively and work reliably and productively while remaining secure takes a considerable amount of knowledge and experience. We often tell our customers that nearly every IT guy has a different way to do it and even well meaning and intelligent IT professionals will argue over the optimal way of doing it. How confident would you feel if you encountered three surgeons arguing over how they were going to perform your next surgery?
Expensive to maintain – Labor is the most expensive component of any IT infrastructure. And even well designed IT environments require regular maintenance and administration. IT environments that are not well designed take even more.
Cycle of obsolescence – The sad truth is that even the best equipment and software is only designed to last 3 to 4 years before it needs to be replaced. So if you were lucky to have had the best IT guys design an IT environment that was well matched to your requirements and you maintained it diligently over the last 3 years, it’s about time to do it all over again.
Even with all of these shortcomings, Information Technology has, generally speaking, delivered enough value and productivity that the investment is almost always worth it. However, those productivity increases have been slowing in the last few years and in order to overcome that slowdown, we need to do something different. And we would argue, it needs to be very different.
Over the past ten years we have worked to address the inherent shortcomings in IT. Our hosted computing solution does it. Our mantra has been simple, easy, affordable. The future of IT is looking a bit brighter.
