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Right. Its really hard to predict this kind of shifts in processes, or how processes that you're relied on for a long time have been made obsolete. When that ha

by pm90 8y ago

Right. Its really hard to predict this kind of shifts in processes, or how processes that you're relied on for a long time have been made obsolete. When that happens, big businesses have an especially hard time because they're usually not agile enough to reorient themselves/adopt new processes quickly enough. A peer commenter mentioned IBM. As an ex-IBM'er, I certainly think that is true. The team I worked on adopted agile methodologies (which I think has been largely adopted in the emerging tech teams). But you could still see remnants of old processes and incentives, like a weird emphasis on writing patents. That was kinda shocking to me as a SE to see a patent writing as a part of my job, but I realized it was a holdover from earlier times. Ultimately, while I enjoyed my time there, broken processes for recognizing contribution was among the most important reason I jumped ship.

nickpsecurity 8y ago
"That was kinda shocking to me as a SE to see a patent writing as a part of my job but I realized it was a holdover from earlier times." Useful activity for current times. Patent licensing and suits are a big money-maker and competition blocker for companies like IBM. For instance, Microsoft has made over a billion dollars on patent royalties *for Android." All that distracting paperwork paid off nicely. IBM used their legal team to crush a company selling commercial versions of Hercules emulator. Oracle vs Google. Apple vs Samsung. Intel recently threatened patent suits if anyone clones x86 to get off Intel chips. This stuff has a real, financial benefit to these companies. So, they're justified in investing in it.
- pm90 8y ago
  You make an excellent point. I never thought of it that way and it totally makes sense. I guess I was looking at it from the perspective of an individual: I would rather my work be used to build amazing stuff than as way to extort others.
nostrademons 8y ago
It's funny, though, that it's often very easy for an outsider to predict these kinds of shifts in processes, because they have no vested interest in the status quo and are evaluating everything with fresh eyes. As a kid growing up with computers in the 90's, I knew IBM was doomed. Why? Because buying an IBM-brand PC when a clone cost 1/2 the price and did exactly the same stuff was ridiculous, and Microsoft owned the software you actually used (and had to make sure all your apps were compatible with). Older folks would tell me "Well, IBM makes most of its money selling to enterprises, and they can charge millions of dollars for a computer" and I'd be like "Why would you do that when you can buy a PC for a couple thousand and hire a high-school kid to program it for you?" and they'd mutter something about transaction processing and customer support and how nobody got fired for buying IBM, and I'd be like "That's stupid. Their customers are all going to go bankrupt, and then IBM will too." I was a pretty insufferable teenager, but I was right about a lot of that. I'm 37 now, I've lived through four generations of technology (PC, web, mobile, and cloud) and retrained for each, and I find I need to make a conscious effort to try and see everything through college-student eyes. If I were a new grad just coming out of school, how would I evaluate the world? And I try to keep that in mind whenever I read eg. a thread on crypto here. The total volume of all data on the Ethereum blockchain is roughly what I would process in 10 minutes with a small MapReduce when I was working at Google. But it's very likely a college student today would be like "So? What's the point, when nobody trusts the answers you give them because you're just a giant corporation that keeps all your data secret?"
- gascan 8y ago
  I use to ask my father why he bothered using a desktop email client. It seemed like useless overhead, and webmail was the future. Well, webmail is indeed everywhere- but I now use a desktop email client daily. Outsiders don't tend to talk about the predictions they got wrong.
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    Heh, that's very true, but I think that the predictions I've gotten wrong actually tend to err on the side of being too conservative about the future rather than too radical, or of betting on the wrong horse between radical alternatives. I was skeptical of the WWW at first ("Gopher is better organized"), continued to use Eudora and then Outlook right up until GMail came out ("you have to be online to read your e-mail?"), and still don't really get what's so great about Facebook (LiveJournal was better in just about every way, and basically every feature that Google+ forced Facebook into implementing was actually cribbed from LJ a decade before). I think there's a cognitive bias somewhere about people preferring the mental model they already hold over some unknown future. Realistically, pretty much the only thing you can be certain of is that the future will not be the same as today, it's just that picking between many different futures gives you terrible odds of selecting the right one. It seems like your options are assuming that the status quo will continue, which is guaranteed wrong, vs. choosing between multiple competing alternate futures, where you are most likely wrong.
    - perl4ever 8y ago
      If you predict the weather tomorrow will be the same as today, you will be right most of the time. It's easy to do worse with a sophisticated model. That's probably a significant reason why evolution leads to humans and other organisms generally not using too much logical analysis, but simply doing what works until it results in a major disaster.
  - megablast 8y ago
    Well, that is because you get a copy of your email on your machine, so don't have to worry about losing the account as much, and you have offline access.

by pm90 8y ago

nickpsecurity 8y ago

"That was kinda shocking to me as a SE to see a patent writing as a part of my job but I realized it was a holdover from earlier times." Useful activity for current times. Patent licensing and suits are a big money-maker and competition blocker for companies like IBM. For instance, Microsoft has made over a billion dollars on patent royalties *for Android." All that distracting paperwork paid off nicely. IBM used their legal team to crush a company selling commercial versions of Hercules emulator. Oracle vs Google. Apple vs Samsung. Intel recently threatened patent suits if anyone clones x86 to get off Intel chips. This stuff has a real, financial benefit to these companies. So, they're justified in investing in it.

pm90 8y ago
You make an excellent point. I never thought of it that way and it totally makes sense. I guess I was looking at it from the perspective of an individual: I would rather my work be used to build amazing stuff than as way to extort others.

nostrademons 8y ago

It's funny, though, that it's often very easy for an outsider to predict these kinds of shifts in processes, because they have no vested interest in the status quo and are evaluating everything with fresh eyes. As a kid growing up with computers in the 90's, I knew IBM was doomed. Why? Because buying an IBM-brand PC when a clone cost 1/2 the price and did exactly the same stuff was ridiculous, and Microsoft owned the software you actually used (and had to make sure all your apps were compatible with). Older folks would tell me "Well, IBM makes most of its money selling to enterprises, and they can charge millions of dollars for a computer" and I'd be like "Why would you do that when you can buy a PC for a couple thousand and hire a high-school kid to program it for you?" and they'd mutter something about transaction processing and customer support and how nobody got fired for buying IBM, and I'd be like "That's stupid. Their customers are all going to go bankrupt, and then IBM will too." I was a pretty insufferable teenager, but I was right about a lot of that. I'm 37 now, I've lived through four generations of technology (PC, web, mobile, and cloud) and retrained for each, and I find I need to make a conscious effort to try and see everything through college-student eyes. If I were a new grad just coming out of school, how would I evaluate the world? And I try to keep that in mind whenever I read eg. a thread on crypto here. The total volume of all data on the Ethereum blockchain is roughly what I would process in 10 minutes with a small MapReduce when I was working at Google. But it's very likely a college student today would be like "So? What's the point, when nobody trusts the answers you give them because you're just a giant corporation that keeps all your data secret?"

gascan 8y ago
I use to ask my father why he bothered using a desktop email client. It seemed like useless overhead, and webmail was the future. Well, webmail is indeed everywhere- but I now use a desktop email client daily. Outsiders don't tend to talk about the predictions they got wrong.
- nostrademons 8y ago
  Heh, that's very true, but I think that the predictions I've gotten wrong actually tend to err on the side of being too conservative about the future rather than too radical, or of betting on the wrong horse between radical alternatives. I was skeptical of the WWW at first ("Gopher is better organized"), continued to use Eudora and then Outlook right up until GMail came out ("you have to be online to read your e-mail?"), and still don't really get what's so great about Facebook (LiveJournal was better in just about every way, and basically every feature that Google+ forced Facebook into implementing was actually cribbed from LJ a decade before). I think there's a cognitive bias somewhere about people preferring the mental model they already hold over some unknown future. Realistically, pretty much the only thing you can be certain of is that the future will not be the same as today, it's just that picking between many different futures gives you terrible odds of selecting the right one. It seems like your options are assuming that the status quo will continue, which is guaranteed wrong, vs. choosing between multiple competing alternate futures, where you are most likely wrong.
  - perl4ever 8y ago
    If you predict the weather tomorrow will be the same as today, you will be right most of the time. It's easy to do worse with a sophisticated model. That's probably a significant reason why evolution leads to humans and other organisms generally not using too much logical analysis, but simply doing what works until it results in a major disaster.
- megablast 8y ago
  Well, that is because you get a copy of your email on your machine, so don't have to worry about losing the account as much, and you have offline access.