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John Abreau ruminated: On Wed, 16 Feb 2000, Ron Peterson wrote: > So I'm sitting at home with the flu and decided to write a little > doodle... [deleted] > What do you think? Will the profession of managing computers blossom? > Or wither? I'd say that depends on the outcome of our struggle against corporate hogogenization. In a world of free individuals, I'd expect it to blossom. In a world locked up under corporate control, where independent thought is considered a threat to the status quo, it's bound to wither. Hmmm ... I'd think the opposite conclusion should follow. Most of our experience so far is that computer system designed to corporate standards require a great many people around to administer to them. This includes Microsoft systems, whose users generally are helpless when they get flakey, and thus we have lots of corporate customer support to fix all the typical administrative problems. If you want a machine that can be managed by its users, you need a system that was developed by the users, not by corporate designers. So our world of free individuals would be expected to turn out systems that just work and have lots of HOWTO files to help you do the admin work yourself, and there will be no need of professional managers. If a world of corporate homogenization, we wouldn't even have had Windoze to kick around. We'd all be fighting to make MVS and CMS do the job for us, because there wouldn't be anything else, and we'd all be programming in PL/I. (Those who have never worked with these things have no idea how well off you really are. They make Microsoft look cooperative and helpful.) - Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" on the first line of the message body to discuss-request at blu.org (Subject line is ignored).
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