"Beaudry, Green and Sand make the case that the technology bubble that burst in 2000 was far more significant than generally recognized." As I see it, there ha

"Beaudry, Green and Sand make the case that the technology bubble that burst in 2000 was far more significant than generally recognized." As I see it, there have been two milestones in corporate IT history. The first was around getting things into databases that could be shared by multiple users. A good example of this is stuff that used to run on the VAX. Then there was a desktop revolution triggered by the combination of the internet, and Windows NT/2000. You could now push a computer around without being a hobbyist, and microsoft office brought various kinds of productivity. The mindsets created by the previous revolutions are holding us back now. * IT departments suffer from the architectural mistake of creating vast databases with multiple dependent systems on them, making maintenance and quality very hard. How many times have you asked your gas company to make one change that has resulted in some bizarre side-effect on your account? * The dominance of single-user document-centric systems like Microsoft Office hampers effective collaboration. This narrative explains why we're bogged at the moment. It's similar to much of what was written in the 90s - at the time, writers complained that that return on investment in IT was very low, and wealth was shifting to Japan not China.