Have you noticed there really arent a lot of exciting new things happening in the corporate IT world? The economy has put a damper on everything. What may well be the last Comdex was poorly attended. Microsoft and the Justice Department finally reached an agreement, and no one cares. There seems to be a lot of hype about Tablet PCs (yawn) and Blade Servers (double yawn) and wireless. I read this morning more than 500,000 IT jobs simply disappeared in the last year. The pundits are suggesting we technical types need to rush out and get some more education so we can find a real job. Poorly run IT departments are perceived as just another service provider that can easily be replaced or outsourced (see Ouch! below).

None of this has stopped the big guys from trying to get more money from us. The major hardware/software/solution companies are trying their best to get us to migrate all of our software to Web services platforms. This stuff (Web services) has been around for a couple of years now, and while it is very cool technology, we havent seen a massive wave of adoptions. Maybe thats because we are all well satisfied with our second-generation Web servers and really dont want to spend the resources to upgrade again. Maybe we are concerned about security issues. And then maybe we just dont believe the underlying standards are well enough established.

StandardsWhat Standards?