Make it simple A survey of information technology October 30th 2004 Republication, copying or redistribution by any means is expressly prohibited without the prior written permission of The Economist The Economist October 30th 2004 A survey of information technology 1 Make it simple Also in this section Now you see it, now you don’t To be truly successful, a complex technology needs to disappear. Page 3 A byte’s-eye view of complexity Companies’ computer infrastructures contain a Pandora’s boxful of trouble. Page 4 If in doubt, farm it out The ultimate solution to simplifying your datacentre is not to have one at all. Page 5 Spare me the details There is a huge gap between what consumers want and what vendors would like to sell them. Page 7 The mom test A geek’s benchmark for true simplicity. Page 8 The next thing in technology, says Andreas Kluth, is not just big but Metaphorically speaking truly huge: the conquest of complexity What’s the use of all that electronic information if you can’t get at it? Page 10 HE computer knows me as its ene- ers eectively, it is time to declare a crisis. Tmy, says John Maeda. Everything I So, earlier this year, he launched a new re- touch doesn’t work. Take those plug- search initiative called Simplicity at the Hearing voices and-play devices, such as printers and MIT Media Lab. Its mission is to look for Plain old telephone systems are becoming digital cameras, that any personal com- ways out of today’s mess. redundant. Page 11 puter (PC) allegedly recognises automati- Mr Maeda has plenty of sympathisers. cally as soon as they are plugged into an It is time for us to rise up with a profound The blood of incumbents orice called a USB port at the back of the demand, declared the late Michael Der- PC. Whenever Mr Maeda plugs something touzos in his 2001 book, The Unnished Stand by for a spot of creative destruction. in, he says, his PC sends a long and incom- Revolution: Make our computers sim- Page 13 prehensible error message from Windows, pler to use! Donald Norman, a long- Microsoft’s ubiquitous operating system. standing advocate of design simplicity, But he knows from bitter experience that concurs. Today’s technology is intrusive the gist of it is no. and overbearing. It leaves us with no mo- At rst glance, Mr Maeda’s troubles ments of silence, with less time to our- might not seem very noteworthy. Who selves, with a sense of diminished control has not watched Windows crash and re- over our lives, he writes in his book, The boot without provocation, downloaded Invisible Computer. People are ana- endless anti-virus programs to reclaim a logue, not digital; biological, not mechani- moribund hard disc, ddled with cables cal. It is time for human-centred technol- and settings to hook up a printer, and ogy, a humane technology. sometimes simply given up? Yet Mr Maeda The information-technology (IT) indus- is not just any old technophobic user. He try itself is long past denial. Greg Papado- has a master’s degree in computer science poulos, chief technologist at Sun Microsys- and a PhD in interface design, and is cur- tems, a maker of powerful corporate rently a professor in computer design at computers, says that IT today is in a state the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that we should be ashamed of; it’s embar- (MIT). He is, in short, one of the world’s rassing. Ray Lane, a venture capitalist at foremost computer geeks. Mr Maeda con- Kleiner Perkins Caueld & Byers, one of An audio interview with the author is at cluded that if he, of all people, cannot mas- the most prominent technology nanciers www.economist.com/audio ter the technology needed to use comput- in Silicon Valley, explains: Complexity is1 2 A survey of information technology The Economist October 30th 2004 2 holding our industry back right now. A lot to connect every gadget that employees of what is bought and paid for doesn’t get The kink in the middle 1 might use, from hand-held computers to implemented because of complexity. Total IT spending, $bn mobile phones, to the internet. Maybe this is the industry’s biggest chal- 1,400 The mainframe era, says Mr Milunov- lenge. Even Microsoft, which people like FORECAST ich, was dominated by proprietary tech- Mr Lane identify as a prime culprit, is apol- 1,200 nology (above all, IBM’s), used mostly to ogetic. So far, most people would say that 1,000 automate the back oces of companies, so technology has made life more complex, 800 the number of people actually working concedes Chris Capossela, the boss of Services with it was small. In the PC era, de facto Microsoft’s desktop applications. 600 standards (ie, Microsoft’s) ruled, and tech- Software The economic costs of IT complexity 400 nology was used for word processors and are hard to quantify but probably exorbi- 200 spreadsheets to make companies’ front of- tant. The Standish Group, a research outt Hardware ces more productive, so the number of that tracks corporate IT purchases, has 0 people using technology multiplied ten- 1990 92 94 96 98 2000 02 04 06 08 found that 66% of all IT projects either fail fold. And in the internet era, Mr Miluno- Source: IDC outright or take much longer to install than vich says, de jure standards (those agreed expected because of their complexity. on by industry consortia) are taking over, Among very big IT projectsthose costing counted for 35% of America’s S&P 500 in- and every single employee will be ex- over $10m apiece98% fall short. dex; today its share is down to about 15%. pected to use technology, resulting in an- Gartner, another research rm, uses For the past three years, the tech indus- other tenfold increase in numbers. other proxies for complexity. An average try’s old formulabuild it and they come Moreover, the boundaries between of- rm’s computer networks are down for an has no longer worked, says Pip Coburn, a ce, car and home will become increas- unplanned 175 hours a year, calculates technology analyst at UBS, an investment ingly blurred and will eventually disap- Gartner, causing an average loss of over bank. For technology vendors, he thinks, pear altogether. In rich countries, virtually $7m. On top of that, employees waste an this is the sort of trauma that precedes a the entire population will be expected to average of one week a year struggling with paradigm shift. Customers no longer de- be permanently connected to the internet, their recalcitrant PCs. And itinerant em- mand hot technologies, but instead both as employees and as consumers. This ployees, such as salesmen, incur an extra want cold technologies, such as integra- will at last make IT pervasive and ubiqui- $4,400 a year in IT costs, says the rm. tion software, that help them stitch to- tous, like electricity or telephones before it, Tony Picardi, a bon at IDC, yet an- gether and simplify the fancy systems they so the emphasis will shift towards making other big research rm, comes up with per- bought during the boom years. gadgets and networks simple to use. haps the most frightening number. When Steven Milunovich, an analyst at Mer- UBS’s Mr Coburn adds a demographic he polled a sample of rms 15 years ago, rill Lynch, another bank, oers a further observation. Today, he says, some 70% of they were spending 75% of their IT budget reason why simplicity is only now becom- the world’s population are analogues, on new hardware and software and 25% ing a big issue. He argues that the IT indus- who are terried by technology, and for on xing the systems that they already try progresses in 15-year waves. In the rst whom the pain of technology is not just had; now that ratio has been re- wave, during the 1970s and early 1980s, the time it takes to gure out new gadgets versed70-80% of IT spending goes on x- companies installed big mainframe com- but the pain of feeling stupid at each mo- ing things rather than buying new sys- puters; in the second wave, they put in PCs ment along the way. Another 15% are tems. According to Mr Picardi, this suggests that were hooked up to server comput- digital immigrants, typically thirty- that this year alone IT complexity will cost ers in the basement; and in the third wave, somethings who adopted technology as rms worldwide some $750 billion. Even which is breaking now, they are beginning young adults; and the other 15% are digital this, however, does not account for the natives, teenagers and young adults who burden on consumers, whether measured have never known and cannot imagine in the cost of call-centres and help desks, in life without IM (instant messaging, in case the amount of gadgets and features never you are an analogue). But a decade from used because they are so byzantine, or in now, Mr Coburn says, virtually the entire sheer frustration. population will be digital natives or immi- grants, as the ageing analogues convert to Why now? avoid social isolation. Once again, the Complaints about complex technology needs of these converts point to a hugely are, of course, nothing new. Arguably, IT increased demand for simplicity. has become more complex in each of the The question is whether this sort of 45 years since the integrated circuit made technology can ever become simple, and if its debut.