At CNet.news, Matt Asay summarises my own reservations about the value of large IT market analysis companies like Forrester and Gartner: “Analysts… are a lagging indicator of success. They tell an enterprise buyer from whom she should have purchased software and hardware a few years ago, not where she should invest IT dollars tomorrow… [In contrast to the large analyst companies] small analyst firms do a much better job at spotting the future, primarily because they actually spend time talking with customers and vendors involved in buying and selling that future.”
David Donathan observes that, “Unfortunately, there are always those who just don’t get it. You know — those who think organizations need to adapt to remain competitive, that change is good and results in greater efficiencies, that failure to adapt to ‘modernalities’ is evil and counterproductive. Since they usually mean well and truly believe they are trying to improve our situation, we don’t want to cull them from the herd…” Donathan offers 10 steps for dealing with change agents before they ruin everything.
At BBC Radio Labs, information architect and web developer Michael Smethurst is using Ruby on Rails to create a semantic online database of 113 years of Proms concert information. Smethurst describes his first steps and foreshadows future developments, including linking the Proms records to external sources of information; keep an eye on the Radio Labs blog to find out what happens next.
CERN’s LHC Computing Grid will transfer, store and process the largest datasets ever produced. Its success relies partly on an “open-source middleware platform called Globus… designed to gather that information seamlessly as though it’s sitting in a folder on one’s own desktop PC… [In the future, a similar system could enable] home computers to provide instant weather forecasts by accessing information from nearby environmental sensors. Or it might help sift through a life’s accumulation of personal medical records or years of home video footage looking for dimly remembered events. Ironically, CERN’s next great contribution to the Internet could be all but transparent to the end user.”
Microsoft’s US$300 million Vista advertising campaign was doomed before it hit the airwaves: a sad case of yesterday’s guys selling last century’s ideas.
Tags: lagging indicator, Forrester, information architecture, CERN, middleware, grid computing
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