So far, the best I saw is is on Der Spiegel online The Lost Decade - What the World Can Learn from 10 Years of Excesses). It is worth reading and basically shows 2000-2009 as a lost decade marked by 9/11, wars (against terror), the regression of civil rights, the lost of brilliance of democracy, the cut between real street and Wall street… this is a worth reading article. So what about me and IT ?
Personal changes
For me this decade has been astonishingly short. Obviously these dramatic changes in the global geo-politic context have taken some mental energy and promoted a kind of day to day survival attitude. The arrival of two kids also changed a lot my priorities and way of living. Much less travel and more home based work have been my new standards. The Internet with VPN connections made this possible.
Java
Professionally this decade has been Java based. I enjoyed the language and I enjoyed even much more not being dependent of a single vendor like I was with Delphi. However I continue to think it would have been possible to make much more, much better with a bit of effort and much less arrogance from the Java camp and its historical steward – aka SUN. Announcing less and delivering more that would have been great!
Internationalization – productivity
This decade has profoundly changed the economic landscape with globalization. Nearly all sectors have seen their organizations changed as China, India and a few other countries entered on the global market. There is no reason why one can earn his life here and not there. I remark otherwise that the price reduction related to off-shoring is sustained by lack of productivity improvement. Nor the methodology camp (e.g: UML) nor the agile camp provided a serious relief. Moving to dynamic language on the argument to save time on compile is far from what I call productivity improvement. There is still a lot to go to improve software developer productivity.
Google but not the semantic web
On the side of the best invention that changed my day to day life. I cannot forget Google. Yes, I Google a lot. Error codes, product numbers, technologies, bugs etc There is no day for me without Googling anymore. Truly a good thing, I think. ..
On the other side, this Googling attitude reflects some failures in information organization. Web sites are very often focusing on the flashy side of the communication more than on real information organization, functionality and accessibility.
A bit more than 10 years ago, first web sites were usually built by IT departments focusing more on the web server stuff than on the message to convey on the web. Shortly after, this decade started with the raise of glossy marketing based web sites. That’s a pain and it seems to continue hopelessly. Only those sites that merged information culture, sharp technical design and sense of usability emerged: Google, Wikipedia, Amazon…
We can see in the Google success a global failure to extend the semantic web which was an attempt to build interoperability to classify information and link things intelligently…
Abandon of interoperability and of our citizen rights
The abandon of interoperability is a general and dramatic turn of the end of this decade in IT. When I started looking at the Internet protocols – that is back to 1985. Interoperability was the top subject among networkers. Asking everybody to connect to the same system / provider to exchange information (at that time messages) was considered an obscene non-sense. These were the years one of the most original IT fair / get together was called ‘Interop’.
Dreaming an ideal interoperable world made an entire industry and changed the world
From this seek of openness and interoperability, we have seen emerging the Internet, the web and all the things that go with them.
Unfortunately business centralization powered by an aggressive capitalist seek of immediate profitability has turned the focus on central, closed, non interoperable systems. I am not writhing anything against capitalism or profit but against a closed, non-democratic, unfair short term minded approach.
Typically that’s the so called ‘social networking / twittering ‘ things. Technologically that’s nothing, functionally not that much either but the surrender is enormous as we give up our private information, liberty, freedom of speech and intellectual property to (commercial) entities.
Security acts excessively affected citizen rights but are unable to grant a risk free world
This trend is accentuated by national security laws issued as a consequence of terror acts. All democratic countries have seen their civil right decreased. In a few cases for the good (may be) but in most cases for the bad. The recent terrorist attempt shows clearly that the loss of privacy in communication has done little to improve security yet the attacks against the independent press and the non-governmental associations continue to surge. The danger is serious to lose much more than we can win.
The 'one way of thinking' dominated and pushed the press of the largest and most established democratic country to support the war in Irak while the so called evidences of the Weapon of Mass Destruction were nothing more than (poorly) animated Powerpoints.
Media decoding in the human sense need to be explained to our children but more unfortunately to most citizens and I am afraid even to a lot of professionals.
Intellectual property & centralizing trend
February first, Belgium will extend its taxes on various media storage devices in order to reward musical artists. In spite of what some says (for example Chris Anderson with its book Free), the issue of intellectual property rewarding is far from being solved. Wikipedia authors are not paid by Wikipedia, but how do they live? Somebody must pay them for what they do. Why not for their expertise? The so called free model seems to be supportable only by huge market and giant operators. In any case the Belgian taxes looks like a tax on electricity to support gaz lamp lighters…
Until now, intellectual property protection for software had little success to establish copy protection or fight reverse engineering. The centralization / software as a service / cloud computing stuff is an attempt to keep the software source inaccessible to users.
While understandable, this is not acceptable if we cannot masterize the life of our own data. Interoperability and privacy are simply implemented with personal devices (this was the great expectation from personal computing at the end of the seventies) but are technological challenges for centralized systems.
We should not surrender or give up on that. This is a call against tyranny, for democracy and civil rights.
Reasons to hope at least to act
A few weeks ago, the Copenhagen submit closed without concrete decisions. I remarked in my surrounding some climate-change skeptics . Everybody has the right to his own opinion. But their arguments are globally not scientific but sophist. Arguments against smoking restriction and creationist are very similar. Again that’s frightening….
Ecologists are usually standing on the left side of the political scene and took global posture against the capitalist world because of devastating industries. Again that’s understandable, although observance of nature destruction by socialist and communist countries should merit serious investigation from most ecologists.
My conviction is that a new economy has to be rebuilt not by re-engineering finance but by enforcing global, multi-factors ethic decisions processes in all our economic and social behaviors. Intense analytic decisions and global transparency will be needed, there IT may help.
Independently of any arguments for or against climate changes. I am convinced that doing anything cleanly is better. Some pretend that this new ecological target will prevent business and will cut jobs. I don’t agree, new industries have to be built; they will bring new jobs and opportunities. Being able to bring wealth to all human instead of a minority will be sign of success.
Helping modestly to build the necessary network of knowledge will be, I hope, on the roadmap of my next decade.
Best wishes for 2010!
Christophe Hanon
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