Twenty years is a long time in human terms -- and in publishing -- but it's a millennium in the world of high tech and enterprise software. The year Managing Automation was founded happens to be the year I started working as a journalist covering the software industry in Silicon Valley. Looking back, the changes that have taken place seem profound indeed.
Ironically, while much has changed on the technology side -- new software, new hardware, new vendors -- it's still the same old story on the business side. Software is complicated, hard to use, and hard to harness in the service of business goals. Companies still grapple with their technology strategies, and they still pay too much for and use too little of the software that they acquire. Vendors still use fear, uncertainty, and doubt in vying with one another, and in the process confuse everyone, including themselves. In other words, the more it changes, the more it stays the same.
Which is why old warhorses like Managing Automation are still relevant two decades after their launch, and why I expect to be able to fund my young children's college education working as an industry analyst for the next two decades. I have always half-joked that if the software industry ever gets it right, I'll have to quit what I'm doing and get an honest job. Luckily, after 20 years of wearing down the humorous side of that line, the truthful part is still relevant.
That's because the software industry is driven by what I believe is the Andy Warhol corollary to Moore's Law, that famous declaration by Intel founder Gordon Moore that innovation would allow the complexity of microprocessors to double every 18 months to two years.
The Andy Warhol corollary is the following: Every innovative concept in high tech will eventually be well understood for 15 minutes, whereupon it will become a commodity and cease to amaze and confuse us, as well as provide distinct competitive advantage. In other words, just when you grasp a new piece of software's usefulness, its competitive advantage begins to disappear.
In case anyone thinks this means that I don't believe we've come very far in the last 20 years, let me dispel that once and for all. Anyone looking at manufacturing, inventory, logistics, finance, or any other part of the enterprise touched by innovation over the last 20 years cannot help but acknowledge the extraordinary impact that new software has had on productivity, competitiveness, and functionality.
In two of the manufacturing industries that touch all of our lives -- personal computers and automobiles -- extraordinary product innovation has been matched by equal or greater amounts of innovation on the manufacturing side. The result has been products that have significantly outperformed their predecessors, at prices that are basically the same or, in the case of PCs, orders of magnitude cheaper.
Even if the software industry has arrived there sometimes by chance, and sometimes by guile, and has forced change on its users, innovation does rule, and improved productivity is the result. It may not be a perfect world, but it's the one I've come to know and love for the last 20 years. May the industry, and MA, last another 20 as well -- or at least until the kids are out of college.