Its been reported by IT News of Australia that at a Gartner symposium recently analyst Dennis Gaughan said none of the big four IT vendors (Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and SAP) are “re-imagining” IT,  “You won’t find innovation in their product portfolio,” he said. “You might find it if you try and talk to the research parts of these organisations. I would argue that a lot of what they are trying to do is keep status quo and find ways to increase share of wallet. There isn’t an innovation agenda. They have to think about investors. If they get on the leading edge, it exposes and impacts them on the short-term.”

In other words, these vendors are trying to hold us back.

Microsoft are partciularly keen to lock users into the Windows stack to protect their cash cows of Windows and Office. The analyst advised CIOs to consider migration to Windows 7, Office 2010 and SharePoint 10, but said they should only consider Windows 8 for tablet deployments in the short and medium term, and take extreme caution before deployment of Office365.

While for the most part the IT industry loves Microsoft (it provides many a techie with lucrative employment) I personally find the underlying complexity and sometimes downright ineptness of some of the company's products hugely frustrating. As an example the management of file permissions under Windows server is at best a blunt instrument and at worse a mess. Something that annoys me on a daily basis. Most IT people now won't know what I'm on about, but anybody who has used the no longer fashionable Netware and it's asociated directory services will understand how these things should work. In my view it's the weakness of Microsoft's file system that's driven the demand for Sharepoint.

Fortunately innovation can be found in other quarters. Apple are making inroads into the traditional desktop space which is increasingly going mobile, and Google is after Microsoft's crown jewels of collaboration and email (although Google brings with it another set of worries). Meanwhile, on the web, Open Source software, which has failed to make much impression on end users, is dominant with the majority of webservers running an open source stack ( Linux / Apache / MySQL PHP ).

Interesting times to work in IT, where an increasingly broad range of skills are going to be required.

Reference: IT News of Australia

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