Tech that Gen Y will sweep away
Summary
Topics
Talking to silicon.com about his latest book Grown Up Digital, Tapscott laid out five "generational firewalls" that bosses need to tear down if they want to attract the brightest and best of Generation Y.
Here are technologies that are going to soon become obsolete if Generation Y has its way.
Email
"Young people see email as good for sending a thank you letter to an aunt but not much else."
Websites
"The internet is increasingly about building community, not providing content - it offers a way for people to self-organise to create communities. That is why Facebook beat Match.com, why bloggers are beating CNN.com and why Wikipedia is beating Encyclopaedia Britannica."
Datacenters
"They are going to move into the cloud, in much the same way that electricity companies moved away from the practice of having their own power plants onsite during the early days of electricity."
Fixed line phones
"They will be replaced by mobile devices."
The personal computer
"They will be replaced by small always-connected devices with a high degree of mobility. The personal computer was always an oxymoron for me, it's like the idea of personal sex. The purpose of computing is to communicate."
Traditional data processing
"This is headed for the ashcan of history. Everything in a report will have an XML tag called eXtensible Business Reporting Language." [This provides an identifying tag for each piece of information which is computer readable so the machine can understand what data it is handling].
This article was originally posted on silicon.com.
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Email, not gonna leave any time soon, this technology though limited in scope, is the new backbone of the inter-office memo.
Websites, I shouldn't need to say anything since this is on one.
Datacenters, where will the cloud be without them?
Fixed Phone lines, though this is the one I really would like to see gone, I doubt it will happen in this generation, where I live cellular phones have no signal, and no carrier has any plans to build a tower, ever, I live in a low population area, and the big boys don't want the little bit of business we would give them, so the landline is our lifelink
PCs? that statement is rediculous. What the heck would I be using to read this without one? What would the ******** gamers use? Why would I get rid of the one place, thats 100% private, in my home, to store all my data?
And lastly, traditional data-processing, well I really don't have anything to say about this because the statement "traditional data processing" in itself means it is outdated, new technologies will always replace old ones, newer, better, faster, more accountable methods are being developed every day, and have been since the beginning of computing, so this one is a duh statement in my mind
A lot of so-called "Third World" countries skipped right by the era of universal land-lines and are going straight to universal mobile. It's fairly cheap.
1) Email - too many corporations and government entities use email for these slackers to cause the end of email.
2) The day Facebook figures out how to make money, then maybe. It is not about web hits, it is about the bottom line. Acting hip and cool is not going to pay the server maintenance and Internet connectivity fees.
3) Where do you think this "cloud" exists? In a data center.
4) Fixed land lines are going no where. They will either fight back with competitive pricing or they will morph into high speed data lines. Maybe when the last Baby Boomer dies, then land lines might bite the dust.
5) A stupid portable phone PDA-like device replacing a PC? Dude if you believe that, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. BTW, what do you think people use do develop the software for your pocket gadgets? A PC.
6) Sure XML will solve all problems, cure cancer, end poverty and hunger, figure out how to travel faster than the speed of light, etc. XML is just another tool of "traditional data processing".
If this is the best of Gen Y, then the Baby Boomers and Gen X have nothing to fear, except when they get too old to work and have to rely on Gen Y to fund Social Security and Medicare.
Don't separate the roots from the branches.
Well child...I'm a baby boomer who has WORKED his a$$ off to get where I am today in the IT field. NOBODY has handed me anything.
My parents were divorced when I was 4, and my mother raised 3 children on her own, as a working mother. I got my first job at age 9...a paper route...something your generation has no clue about?and saved my money to buy the things my mother was unable to provide.
I have had the ?pleasure? of working with many of your generation?and believe me?you children wouldn?t know what hard work was, even if it bit you in the backside.
I've been working since I was 9 (I'm 27) including a paper route, mowing lawns, cashering, moving furniture, and so on. So here's one Y that knows hard work better than most. And ya know what..I'm not even that upset at having put all those extra thousands of dollars in social security that I'll most likely never see a dime of when I'm in my 60s cause the Boomers will suck it dry.
Websites? - Information is good and necessary. Networking sites have limited applicability - they are not the answer to all information=sharing needs.
Datacenters? - Cloud processing is not the answer to all computing requirements. There are and will always be issue of security and availability. If my business survival depends on my IT, I want that IT under my control - not some company which could be bought out, merged or bankrupt.
Land Lines? - Cellphone coverage is not universal and may never be.
PC? - There is a growing shift to thin clients, but this seems to run is cycles - we've been thru this before.
Traditional Data Processing? -
"Much of the [IT] history of the last 20 years has involved replacing what workd with what sounded good."
Of the proportion of BUSINESS data that is digitized, the overwhelming majority still sits on mainframes. That is not going away anytime soon - and IBM & the business world just woke up to that fact and are making a big push to get mainframe training back into the educational process as it used to be.
IBM mainframes morph thru succeeding generations, but I expect to see them around 30 years from now (assuming I's still around then).
Wherever the future might lead us, that
concepts have been established, and even though
others may come and go, these ones will still
remain for quite some years.
What we will of course see is that Gen Y will
evolve them, specially by mashing-up or
cramming these technologies with others or in a
different way.
I also hope to be here by that time...
Cheers.
The Gen Y's are working jobs and can't understand why they have to do everything "the slow way." They can rattle off multiple ways to improove thier jobs, but are discouraged then those ideas fall on deaf, ignorant, and beaurocratic ears.
Of course that youth is really just a lazy unappreciative mob with a sense of entitlement who wouldn't recognize a hard day's work if they stepped in a steaming pie of it.
This kind of ageist posturing has been going on since homonids learned to reproduce.
The only certainty is that today's paradigm is tomorrow's obsolesence ... and predicting what will become tomorrow's standard is as reliable as forecasting the DOW.
Your post assumes that we've moved from green screens to windowed interfaces to web interfaces to WEB 2.0 etc...
Well, let me tell you that green screens are alive and well as interfaces for core business applications that were written 30 or 40 years ago.
Of course the conflict the title alludes will be there. I have that conflict with green screens and fixed sized fields, that doesn't mean that they are going away anytime soon.
Good luck--I'm not quitting email yet.
Wikipedia are you kidding me??. Has this author tried to edit a page there?. The only thing new there the technology. Using a MySpace Page or twitter as a source is considered treason (ie unreliable source),The New York or Times of London are the holy grail of sources. The "personal" stuff that is the backbone of social networking is "unencyclopedic scandalous trash". Wikipedia and YouTube comment pages another Gen Y forum make the cable news networks actually look civil, no idealistic teamwork there.
Wikipedia beat Encyclopedia Britannica because Britannica's website is clunky. Nothing really new about that
I don't think anyone, including the author, was implying using MySpace, Facebook, Twitter or whatever other social networking site out there as a "holy grail of sources". I'm pretty sure the point is that social networking should be embraced by business and not shunned by the older generations who still believe we should be using carrier pigeons to deliver messasges than computers sending e-mails. (A little exaggeration, but you get the point)
Wikipedia has its purpose. But more importantly, the technology surrounding Wiki's and blogs is really what has benefit to companies. We're not talking personal blogs or the public Wikipedia sites ... we are talking customized versions for use internally in businesses as well as externally to communicate to stock holders and investors.
Also, please don't generalize about the laziness of Gen Y. Some of the most successful up-and-coming tech companies have Gen Y founders and braintrust. What those who choose a white-collar path instead of a blue-collar path lack in the "hard work" you all speak of, they make up for in innovation and technical knowledge. It's been this way for years ... Gen X and Baby Boomers started this trend. Most of the younger generation don't want to work in factories or production lines, they view success as working their way up the Corp. ladder and taking the path of least resistance. Don't belittle them for that. Baby Boomers started that trend with "entitlement".
As for Wikipidia discussion pages and YouTube talk pages they tend to be conflict ridden and in the case of YouTube full of personal attacks.
Maybe it is just me, but I have found the exact opposite of the authors utopian vision in my dealings with Web 2.0.
...words just cannot express how sick I am of the way so many seemingly-sensible media outlets piss themselves in excitement every time J. Random Internet comes up with a slightly different, slightly more over-simplified way to do the same things we've always been doing. We haven't had a serious computing revolution since the Web was invented, and these ain't it.
people will still communicate through email, much like
we still communicate through the phone.
The other points on datacenters and fixed phone lines
are no brainers, since we already see a shift in those
areas. It is just a matter of time.
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