In a long conversation with a friend of a friend who was thought might find us some work, I was slapped in the face with a basic truth of the Information Technology industry that perhaps says more than anything else about why I'm better off getting out of the whole scam.

Our talk had turned to how, very often, complex problems only seem complex if looked at using the wrong paradigm, but when viewed from another angle, the solutions would almost write themselves, and what hit me back was how my boyish attitude of doing it right the first time was not only naive and adorably cute coming from a middle-aged greying man, but how it was, apparently, completely contrary to the way things are done in the world of real men.

The Best Answer is not the Right Answer

My example was my story on how, during my OpenCola days, I had worked on the lease-manager for the P2P file trading Swarmcast system and had originally thought to use SOAP-based webservices to solve synchronization problems between super-nodes. I wanted to learn SOAP, no doubt about it, and usually, when you have a project that requires a new technology, you do, I confess, tend to look for ways to use the client's money to teach yourself the new skill.

The whole dotNet/SOAP thing just seemed too cool.

But on closer examination, the more I became tangled in trying to make it work, the more I realized that I was looking at this problem inside out -- or more exactly, I was looking at the dual-space of the problem set, trying to think in terms of functions and protocols instead of framing the problem as documents and states. Once I came to that bit of insight, I shifted over to an HTTP model and from there started throwing out unnecessary code all over the place. What remained was simple, elegant, robust and eminently scaleable, and vastly cheaper to build and to maintain.

It was only then, while discussing this online, that a colleague introduced me to Roy Fielding and his REST campaign to educate people about these myths of remote function call oriented webservices. To get back to this conversation with this job-prospect friend of a friend, it seemed I had just shot my own foot and put the bleeding mass of it in my mouth with my RPC-vs-REST story ...

Their shop, this sharp and well-suited shop where I've come begging for work, is completely committed to dotNet development, even though they fully realize why it won't work ...

you see, like most con artists and other brokers, privately, among the fellowship of these bretheren thieves we call IT-People, they will confide and boastfully admit:

By deploying dotNet today they are guaranteeing work for themselves tomorrow when the whole application will need to be re-engineered.

They are intentionally, and proudly ripping off their clients by deploying a system known to be defective and inadequate. They are not stupid, they comprehend the full ramifications of the vendor-lockin of this plan, but they also know that the client hasn't any means to understand this issue. They know too how this monopoly technology strategy plays on the client's naive fears, and how it hits the hot-buttons of expectations foisted by the massive marketing push to convince everyone to hand Microsoft the gatekeeper keys to all essential business infrastructure.

"Everyone is deploying .Net applications!"

Oh, really? So, if I wanted to purchase a .Net service today what could I buy?

"Uh ... ok ... well, no one has actually deployed anything ..."

So, effectively, you are re-tooling your shop to become hooked to an untested technology with no security model and no precident examples and it's only because you're being told, by the vendor and its paid media mostly, that everyone else is doing it? Ok ...

They are, they say too, deploying all their new web applications on MSIIS because it is, "the most 'popular' platform" and so, being ever the one for clarity, I called him out on that, I pointed to the Netcraft Surveys that clearly show the lion's share belongs to Unix/Apache with Linux roaring louder than ever, and yes, the smile, the wink, the acknowledgement I'd caught the trick: "It is the platform most of our customers know" -- and yes, he knows full well that this particular choice drives up the development and long-term maintenance cost, but hey, the rubes will buy it, so, like, what's your point?

They know it is wrong, they know it is a scam, and they are proud of it. It is, they say, "Good business."

Another colleague confided in me, on my saying how I might save the school-board a cool million per by shifting them, like Munich, to free alternatives for their Officeware; he said he had proof, that he'd done a feasibility study for a similar sized client, and yes, it was true, only the reason his client ordered the study was not to make the shift, but to use as a brick-bat to brow-beat Microsoft into lower the absurd license fees. Microsoft's price is, of course, so fair and low-overhead that they didn't even hesitate to knock the price down to a fraction of the stated ticket. It being, of course, "Good business".

This is why I don't belong in the IT business: After all these years, I'm just too dense, I still just don't get it.

It is a critical handicap that I just can't detach myself clinically from that rush of watching people using my technology. When they look at me with those doe-eyes, completely without any conceptual understanding of how to make these blasted machines do what they need, I can't resist. I just melt, I buckle my resolve to rip them off, and I help them.

I can't help it, it's probably something deeply seated in my psyche. I'm hopeless at deceptions; ask me if this used car was really driven by a little old lady on Sundays, and I'll confess that she was a Nascar Granny.

And so I have constructed my own obsolescence. I have taught all of my clients so well, none of them need me. Those I haven't taught, all seem wooed to the XP/dotNet/SOAP anyway, giddy with the rush of pouring ever more of their money down the gaping black hole that is the 'dot' in dotNet, and when I announce that I don't play that game, they correctly guess I'm not the one you want, babe, I'm not the one you need.

I don't have the slick magician's slight-handed skill to compete in that shell game: If I did, I think selling insurance would be more a profitable use of it anyway.

It was supposed to be fun

This is what I miss most about how the Internet and the Information Technology industry has turned out. I got into it in the 70's because it was fun, because you flipped some toggles and be damned if you didn't get some answer that someone actually needed and yet they could get that answer no other way. It was fun to squeeze the last 6 bytes out of a program to shoe-horn it into an Osborne's 128Kb of RAM, and it was fun to squeeze every last stream-compressed bit out of 2400BAUD just so you could have some semblance of a full-screen terminal that made the experience that much more inviting.

And it was fun, wasn't it? It was a blast hooking up artist collaborations on the old BBS systems, it was a hoot lurking in the shadows and watching people who'd never touched a computer before as they discovered the Internet in the Science Centre cafe, and it was with some pride and awe that I could watch grandma login on Sympatico and exchange emails with my kids. I had a hand in all that, and it was fun to do it, we had a blast, you could feel good about the work you did every day. We weren't soldering vendor lockins, we weren't delivering eyeballs to advertisers, we weren't padding budgets or soaking education to pay license tithes that the big corps somehow manage to get waived; we spent every last penny on the task of making the hardware serve people, and we took pains to squeeze every last ounce of communications performance out of every penny.

When did it become a sleazy con-job with petty thieves hiding their motives behind the dense jargon and obscurity of their tools? When did it become a cash-grab where the point of users was to get used? I look at the overbuilt, ill-conceived, technically opaque doubletalk contract tenders going by the RFP wire these days, and truth be told, I don't even want any of them. I'd rather sell toasters because that's at least honest work, and my customers could buy any brand of bread they liked.

My Mother called last night, concerned about our collapsing business, on our absolute and total lack of even the most remote business prospect as the fruits of our 22-year journey on this Teledynamics campaign trail:

"Do you think, dear, that if you dumped all that Linux stuff off your computer and just ran Windows like everybody else, do you think then that you might find some work?"

No doubt, ma. No doubt.