Flat Earth Blog
This IT industry has been my home for over 35 years — I’ve seen a lot of change in that time!
In 1976, mainframe computers were giving up their dominance to smaller, faster, cheaper and infinitely more flexible mini-computers, and that loss of dominance rocked the mainframe world to it’s core. Ultimately mainframes went “bye bye.”
By 1980, the personal computer was becoming the “toy at home” that every IT professional tinkered with. Lacking software, connectivity and horsepower, these small systems didn’t seem to have “the right stuff” to displace anything, much less the now entrenched mini-computers; but, that changed too!
Through informal adoption, starting with actual owners and users bringing their “toys” to the office, and the new networking models from Banyan, Novell, IBM, DEC, the same improvements in size, speed, cost and flexibility, led IT to value and then rely on PC’s as the replacement for the dumb-terminal and much, much, more.
Same with Servers. Then the Internet. Yada, yada.
Now we stand at another radical (and pardon the hideously overused phrase) “paradigm shift.” — Tablets and SmartPhones.
I’m not unique in calling this new trend a game-changer. I’m jumping on the bandwagon for one particular purpose — My mid-market customers (small corporations, large privately held companies, and orgranizations) are typically underserved in getting guidance on how to take advantage of new trends, and often lag months or years in getting any strategy for the newest advances to help them leverage IT.
These same mid-market IT environs often have early adoption impacts of new technologies that provide potential for them to innovate for their businesses and get the greatest gains, I believe, from new IT trends.
The Flat Earth Blog is devoted to bringing Tablet/SmartPhone strategies and tactics of “how”, “why” and “when” to mid-market IT.
Stay tuned.
(Next week: “Flat Earth Vocabulary: Speaking the Same Lingo”)
Chris Krueger, PEI
