The IT Industry's Red Shift Theory 176
Stony Stevenson writes "Sun Microsystems' CTO, Greg Papadopoulos has come out with a Red Shift Theory for IT which posits that an 'elite group of companies are consuming inordinate amounts of IT infrastructure, well beyond most other businesses, and that their demand is growing exponentially. This trend, Papadopoulos maintains, has implications not just for IT's most insatiable consumers, but for the structure of the computing industry itself. It's not just about how many CPU cycles a company uses. Papadopoulos argues that red-shift companies will enjoy exponential business growth in the coming years. Blue-shift companies — those whose processing needs aren't exploding — will grow at about the same rate as GDP, he says.'"
so....... (Score:5, Insightful)
(Yawn).
But... Doppler... (Score:4, Funny)
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I don't know what's more disgusting: how clumsy and obviously marketeering the comparison is, or that some people might actually swallow it. I feel like I'm being sold something by a fast-talking Australian on a shopping channel.
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Re:But... Doppler... (Score:4, Informative)
(A blue shift happens when things are getting closer to one another, not further apart. These supposed companies not accelerating would look exactly as red-shifted to the accelerating ones as vice versa.)
Re:But... Doppler... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:But... Doppler... (Score:5, Funny)
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BUT they misuse the exponential term. (How many businesses can grow exponentially?) Do the authors know how fast of an increase that is for all but the smallest firms?
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there are really two different application sets driving computing demand: one consisting mostly of newer Web-facing applications driving exponential growth in both user demand and computing requirements; the other comprising back-end systems that are growing at more historical rates.
He's saying that the fast paced web-fronted growth should move to mainframes and not cheap commodity hardware.
A shift to lower-cost, lower-risk utility computing, mostly on sophisticated "big iron" servers
He may have a point here about "lower-risk utility computing"... depending on what he means by "risk".
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'Exponential' fails common sense. (Score:4, Insightful)
Exponential business growth is not possible simply because the number of customers is finite. Even if you make something that all 6 billion people will buy, you're still not going to be able to maintain exponential growth very long before everybody is a customer.
Re:'Exponential' fails common sense. (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, eventually you need to be producing everything people use and consuming all available resources. Then, if you want to keep growing, you need to start doing something really novel (asteroid mining, that kind of thing), but that won't happen for a long time. Exponential growth is completely possible for short periods; Sun experienced it themselves in the .com boom.
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Here's how you can do it (Score:2)
2. Open a no-fee savings account and deposit at least $10
3. Presto, your business is now growing exponentially!
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Not true. Economies can and do grow exponentially which means that the average wealth per person growth exponentially as well (assuming population is constant) as do companies (on average).
This growth must slow down eventually but the number of customers is not the limiting factor because they can spend exponentially more as they get exponentially richer.
Re:'Exponential' fails common sense. (Score:5, Insightful)
Exponential growth for a business isn't even possible
Sure it is. 2% growth is exponential.
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How naive. At that point you do the RIAA and resell them the same thing in a slightly new form, again and again, over and over again ad nauseaum. And if the damn fools - er, customers - stop buying it, then you blame pirates and start using the legal system as a blackmail tool to extract money directly from random people.
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Of course, it's possible. Not only possible, but actually very easy to do. You start with no business and the next year, you have twice as much, and so on. Though seriously, exponential growth is what the general economy has been doing for quite a while. Every year, we get X % growth, so it's exponential. Exponential doesn't mean it has to go through the roof, 0.00001 % annu
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erm, twice as much as no business is no business.
By the way, continuous exponential growth is not possible. This is because resources are finite. It has nothing to do with customers or imaginitive ways of re-packaging a similar product to maintain growth.
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Exponential is exponential (the increase from this year to next year is larger than the increase from last year to this year). It doesn't matter how you measure it. You can measure it in dollars, percentage, pounds or filluvian credits.
You are stil going to run out of resources though, unless you are importing resources from outside the planet.
"... quite a long
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Yes, but the money people pay for that service is earned from their job which is ultimately earned (trough many steps) from some resource somewhere on the planet.
What we forget in the west is that all of our wealth ultimately comes from some kind of resource on the earth. Be it oil, gems, food, coal. Even if you are a trader in the city selling and buying futures in the service industry sector, ultimately the source of that wealth comes from some resource on the earth.
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It's the money spent on those intangibles that is earned from money that is not intangible.
All of them come from resources. Most of them come directly from resources, but the other part come indirectly from resources (because the people that pay your wages have most of there imcome from resources
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Name a value that originates entirely in the human mind and I will try and show that it actually originates in resources and the ultimately everything starts with resources. (It might be tomorrow now as it's getting late here in the UK).
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Even heard of inflation? Noticed how prices and salaries have both been growing exponentially for quite a while (as in more than a hundred years) now?
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That isn't exponential growth... that is geometric growth.
Exponential is the norm. (Score:2)
Not exactly. Most financial measures of growth are compounded measures, which are exponential functions. For example, compound interest of 5% gives exponential growth of 1.05^n, where n is the number of compounding periods. When economists say that the GDP is growing at 3% or that an investment is giving an annual rate of return of 10%, those are (averaged) exponential gro
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However... Your money is [wikipedia.org] based on debt [wikipedia.org]. Debt increases exponentially and requires exponential growth in the economy to service it.
Re:no, no, no (Score:4, Funny)
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If Professor Hawking says it... (Score:2, Funny)
Heh. Except he doesn't say that (Score:2)
Which doesn't even make sense as "growth equals growth", since not everyone is a software company. E.g., for a car manufacturer or someone like Nike or Coca Cola, exactly how does overspending on IT translate into faster growth? While _some_ benefits do exist, and I've seen them first h
Huh? (Score:5, Funny)
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Red Giants (Score:5, Funny)
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Except the rat and ketchup salesmen.
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Only in a fantasy context (Score:2)
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[[citation needed]]. My suspicion is he used an alternate spelling already in common use.
So companies that innovate will make more money? (Score:2)
Get out of town...
It's true, innovation takes a fair amount of software development (if that's what you're building). If you're doing accounting systems for state governments, your revenue will grow more slowly, unless you add a new state or something.
Of course, out in the real world, there's more than IT - corning has been growing fairly fast over the past 5 years, and they seem to have done it with carbon filters.
Every week (Score:4, Insightful)
I thought the Bursting of the Bubble had cured people of falling for this kind of arguments (which were used over and over again during the Bubble to justify insane valuations for companies which never made a cent).
Guess the leeches didn't gave up on trying to suck the fools dry yet.
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Why? It's never stopped bubbles from forming or bursting in the past, going all the way back to the famous South Sea Bubble.
It's a different mechanism, though (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, that's insightful in its own way, but you have to remember that bubbles are caused slightly differently.
Bubbles are based on greed. Pure, distilled, unadulterated greed. At some point the prospect of making lots of undeserved money, is causing people's brains to switch to the wishful thinking that some greater dope will take the fall. People keep dumping money into a bubble preci
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Every company I've seen is still mired in red tape and completely backwards use of much of the technology we require to survive. If we actually did streamline our business
Re:Every week (Score:5, Interesting)
In the big picture of how a company is successfull, software is a tool, networking technologies are tools and the Internet is a tool. It all boils down to people and organization - individuals and the way they work together.
IT is something that can fit into the business and can empower the people to work beter - it's not a silver bulet which will magically transform a mismanaged company into a growing, thriving business.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but from someone that has been working in IT for many years, across several industries, it's my experience that the best success stories are not "IT transforming companies", instead they came from "companies that mold IT to their needs".
Red tape is an organizational problem, not a technological problem. Bringing IT in without solving the underlying problem will just result in adding new layers to the bureaucracy (been there, seen it happen, not a pretty sight).
The truth is, IT brings with it whole new time and money sinks (license control, networking/systems administration, IT security, software development and costumization, outside consultants, etc) which would not be there without IT. In truth, as many of us in IT have seen again and again, often the blind, vendor-pushed, fashion-following approach to deploying IT in a company results in wasted money and a decrease in productivity (for that company, the vendors are probably quite happy).
During the Boom years, many companies where managed by people that did not understood that technology is a tool for empowering the business, not the other way around. Countless managers let themselfs be taken with sentences such as "utilizing technology to its fullest potential", "software that can boost our capabilities even farther", "the technology we require to survive", "streamline our business the way software is capable of doing" and other such sales pitches and so let their companies be taken for wild rides, where the only ones that really profited where the vendors. Hopefully, most learned their lesson, and the latest generation of of CxOs is beter at separating the technological wheat from the chaff.
PS: Even though i'm someone which if often brought in to help clean up the mess done during one of those "wild rides" (said mess having been done often enough by the unholy association of software vendors and IT consultancies), I would much rather loose that part of my work in the future that be faced again and again with the kind of raw sewage which is all that has been left from the blood sucking feeding frenzy done by the above mention vendors and consultancies.
PPS: Yeah, i'm sour about this.
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I can tell I buy all your points and I see why it has been modded insightful.
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You'll notice I'm mentioning technology, outside the individual, desktop use your mentioning.
Cause and Effect (Score:5, Insightful)
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Correct, companies that are experiencing (or anticipating) exponential growth in revenue grow their hardware by a similar amount. Hardware is replacing assembly line workers, in some industries, as the cost of production that has to scale with the size of business. Imagine if the same thing was said about a car company and assembly line workers? People would automatically know that exponential growth, or disasterous overreaching, were coming. But fuzz the logic by refering to computers and suddenly an a
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Some companies scale up their IT infrastructure at a faster-than-Moore pace because they need that IT infrastructure. Why do they need it? Because they are experiencing heavy growth. They don't have growth because their IT demands are exploding, their IT demands are exploding because they have growth.
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I would agree, but seeing things from the street level as support goes, I would argue that companies who don't put enough money into IT or streamlining its process will loose money.
Each one of th
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The ST Industry's Red Shirt Theory (Score:3, Funny)
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Maybe "will survive at least into the third season".
Bullshit (Score:2)
TWW
Inventing Terminology for CEO's (Score:5, Funny)
Don't be harsh. Proactively leveraging six sigma synergies in a blue-red shift discontinuously changing ecosystem leads to a re-efficiently contracting contingency workforce paradigm tending toward the rightsize.
Only a fool would ignore the gainshare effect of empowerment strategies that insourced intellectual capital reallocation due to lean Kaizen open door management obviously creates. The mosaic effects of capital market global forward-trends account for fully 4 points share of Sun's complex-component earnings per diluted ownerstake last quarter.
With two new colors to work with, things can only improve.Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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Re:Inventing Terminology for CEO's (Score:4, Interesting)
The algorithm basically works by feeding in a sample text, from which you generate a statistical model of what words are likely to follow any given N-word sequence. Then you select at random which of the possible suffix words to output given the previous N output words. (Obviously you need to provide the initial conditions, i.e. the first N words of output, to the algorithm). If you allow punctuation to be considered part of a word, it seems to produce reasonably grammatical sentences too.
Picking N=2 seems to work pretty well. I imagine if we fed in a bunch of buzzword-laded management texts we'd get some great results.
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Or just use the Dilbert Mission Statement Generator [dilbert.com] with a few minor edits here and there.
Re:Inventing Terminology for CEO's (Score:4, Insightful)
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Pseudoscience (Score:2)
Every company is racing away from every other (Score:4, Funny)
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Also known as the black market.
Microsoft has BSOD (Score:2)
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Its really simple to understand.... (Score:2)
A lot of the shift is from a transmission media that didn't need a lot of processing power to one that does.
Where the amount of media consumers access is growing at a rate less than that.
Where is the difference in the eyes of the consumer... their wallet mostly.
But we have more choices now and a greater level of convenience. IS it worth it?
All I got from this: (Score:4, Funny)
2) Like, a *lot* more.
3) These have to be bloody *fast* computers, if they're causing Doppler shifts.
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Let's for a moment ignore how poor this analogy is (Score:3, Informative)
Picture the whole of IT companies and companies that use IT as a spherical microcosm. The normal physical dimensions in this microcosm are instead dimensions of economy, scale, and technology. Like our universe is puportedly doing, this sphere is expanding. Now, because he claims these "elite" companies are basically exponentially distancing themselves from the other companies, they could arguably be on the extents of the expanding sphere. Although there are fewer of these companies they require much more of our microcosmic IT space. Fair enough. Moving away from us, and red shifted from our perspective in the exact center of the sphere.
So far, so good I guess. Then we have blue-shifted companies. In this microcosm, in order to become blue-shifted to my perspective, you'd have to be heading away from using more advanced technology and also using less of it. Frankly, I can't come up with a single company in the world that's doing that and is successful. If you don't look at in on a time-scale of a year or two, but rather of fifty, one hundred or even five hundred years, it's pretty damn clear that every single company is red-shifted from the perspective of an individual in the center of the microcosmic sphere.
End game.
So I put it to you,
TLF
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1960's claim repackaged - why it faulters (Score:2)
Not really. Data chomping has always been a desire. It just used to not be cost-effective. People indeed did think that IBM would sell bigger and bigger chunks of plug-and-play processing. However, minicomputers and microcomputers ruined that goal. It appears to go in cycles where centralization ebbs and flows as new technologies a
Crunching power is no value in itself (Score:2)
A More Applicable Metaphor (Score:2)
A much better one would equate companies with countries, and growth with energy useage. There's one company that's the US, growing/using much more per capita (per dollar) than the others. There's a few that are growing/using somewhat less, but in the same order of magnitude. There are more and more as you g
Growth and Acceleration as a metric is flawed (Score:5, Insightful)
So when did we all lose sight of what is good for a company? Matters like quality and customer satisfaction are no longer a consideration? And every time I hear "this company is buying that company" or "we're on a growth surge" or some other such nonsense, I have to wonder why anyone would think this sort of institutional business instability is a good idea for anyone except those who play the stock market?
Will we have to suffer another great depression before people realize that the cause of so many of our business, labor and national monetary health problems are rooted deeply in the short-sighted notion that whatever a business does it should be as a means to provide value for shareholders? I think the answer is yes because short of a disaster, people will have little motivation to see where this all leads and turn around before it's too late. And unfortunately, while one person might catch a glimpse of the future and become more sane, the people who are still insane will consume him as a means of satisfying their growth strategy. I get the mental image of a bunch of cannibals strategizing their own growth and acceleration success plans in how to consume their environment. The logic is rather unsettling to me.
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Actually, it doesn't. What does require constant growth is highly leveraged investments. This should ring a bell (subprime loans).
Anything that requires constant growth to succeed is almost certainly a ponzi scheme of one sort or another. Only a small fraction of all the public companies operate this way and they're all incredibly high risk. It just so happens to be the most visible companies (which is another argument as to why investing in their stock is play
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So when did we all lose sight of what is good for a company?
Who's "we"? It's apparently not you and not me.
As I see it, growth gets a lot of press for a few reasons. First, you have the lottery effect where you potentially can "win" big. A stagnant industry won't give you that sort of exciting possibilities unless you play with high leverage stock options. Second, those big opportunities are accessible to someone of small means, ie, it's a story of improving one's status and wealth. It's possible to t
Repeat after me... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the same old saw that hardware firms used in the 1980s-1990s. Gartner used to say you should spend on IT as a proportion of your revenue.
But numerous studies [infoeconomics.com], based on publicly available data, debunk that view as bullshit.
It's not that IT is bad -- it's just that you have to blame or praise management for the proper application of it. Which is just another way of saying "you can't spend your way through problems without thought".
NOW, there's a valid argument here, but it's a lot more subtle than the bylines. One has to dig into Papadopoulos' quotes to get the jist of this as: "you should have the management insight to take advantage of the inherent cost savings that are due to Moore's law." This has been hampered for decades due to inflexibility with the software -- something that virtualization and utility computing is seeking to fix, and an area that Sun wants to compete in. Indeed, this is a big deal.
But it doesn't mean your computing needs will skyrocket, unless your management has an insightful, productive application for all of that power. Google does (selling advertisements along side day-to-day networked computing needs), but I'm not sure the rest of the Fortune 500 has turned to apply that level of creativity to their situation.
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This is why I'd want everyone that's always shouting to increase educational spending have really painful things happen to them. Actually, I think the same about folks wanting a drastic increase in NASA budgets for any manned space missions and many other pet projects. It's not just about money. It'
Hold on, something about this doesn't compute (Score:2)
Let's try: "Company X says that buying lots of company X products will cause your business to grow at an exponential rate".
Aha! Now I see - it's just more marketing doublespeak. I wonder if you could get Sun to put these claims in writing?
hype or space? (Score:2)
Yes, in an arms race you often end up with in the silly spot of "But what do we need 10,000 nukes for." Well, what you need 'em for, if you want to be the only
Isn't the GDP exponential? (Score:2, Informative)
Even if it wasn't, wouldn't the presence of exponentially growing companies force the GDP to go exponential after a while. Maybe such companies will quickly die before they get big enough to do that, but a bad business strategy that leads to a quick death sounds like a bad business strategy (modulo the Enrons and SCOs of the world).
How nice! IT resource envy! (Score:2)
Sheesh...well, "Divide and conquer".
And the there's the... (Score:2)
I sense a new Dilbert comic coming soon ... (Score:2)
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- Prof. Von Drake.
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It's being used as a "treknical term." It doesn't have to mean anything it just has to sound new and important.
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What kind of stupid metaphor is that? Red shift means that they are moving away from the observer fast, blue shift means that they are moving towards the observer fast.
I'm pretty certain this was done deliberately. Imagine you are the observer and you are chasing after the star. If the star is blue shifting you are catching it... if they are red shifting they are leaving you behind. Do you want to get left behind? Do you want to blue shift? No, you want to be the one whom everyone else sees as red-shifting. You want to be the winners of the race. Buy Sun! Rah rah, red shift!