Joint Meeting of the Los Angeles Chapters of ACM and the Association for Information Technology Professionals 

Wednesday, September 6, 2000 

An Infamous Year for IT

Peter Coffee, eWEEK

Who would have thought that network TV news shows would ever feature stories on date-field sizing and arithmetic, denial-of-service attacks, email-borne virus disasters, software industry business practices, or court injunctions barring multimedia file exchange? 

All of these once esoteric subjects got more than fifteen minutes of fame in the last twelve months, and eWEEK Technology Editor Peter Coffee will give us an insider's view of these and other high-profile developments in his annual appearance at our first autumn meeting. 

Peter Coffee is Technology Editor of eWEEK (formerly PC Week), the national newspaper of enterprise information technology. With industry experience at Exxon and The Aerospace Corporation, degrees from MIT and Pepperdine's Graziadio School of Business, and more than a decade as a leading analyst of emerging information technologies, he is also the author of "How To Program Java" and "Peter Coffee Teaches PCs." He writes a weekly column and contributes technical analyses, product evaluations, and commentaries on industry developments that appear in eWEEK and on the newspaper's Web site at www.eWEEK.com. 

Peter Coffee's Annual Update
"An Infamous Year for IT"

Peter Coffee, Technological Editor for eWeek magazine (formerly PC Week) arrived early for his presentation to a joint meeting of the Chapter and the Association for Information Technology Professionals (AITP) and held a pre-dinner round table, with some nice tidbits about the industry. His after-dinner talk, a wide ranging summary of the past year's events that have given IT as a profession some of the most high profile exposure that it has ever had, was conducted (to the relief of all, he said) without the usual stack of viewgraphs.

The year began with all wondering what was going to happen with the Y2k stuff. He even saw a sign in a little town in Missouri "We have storm and Y2K shelters." Some were concerned that he proposed to drive from Missouri back to Los Angeles on January 1st. Peter said "One of the few things I know is that Visa solved their problem a long time ago. The pay-at-the-pump terminals would be working and, yes, I did have an extra $500 in cash in my pocket." Peter said that we in the industry didn't get a lot of respect for the great job that so many people did. By January 3rd words like 'scam', 'panic', 'chicken little' were being bandied about. This was because boards of directors ponied up the money for studies of the problem, and then more money (sometime lots of it) for the necessary remediation. And later said with absolute conviction "If we had not done this we would not have been in business in the middle of January 2000". These were government agencies, health care operations and so on. But the really interesting thing was that people discovered not so much problems within their own boundaries or problems with their IT as such, but rather loose 'spaghetti code' of relationships with people up and down their supply chains, with public agencies on whom they relied, that a lot of those relationships had never been inventoried, had never been subject to configuration control to nearly the thoroughness that characterized their Cobol lines of code. A lot of people asked "How can a Y2K problem shut down a fire truck or shut down a hydraulic press?" But the fact was that someone had had the clever idea of dropping an 8088 into a control panel and set it up to monitor a maintenance schedule and shut down the machine if a January 2000 lube job in was interpreted as occurring in 1900. Not a bad idea in principal, but too often it was impossible to get the maker of that machine to tell them whether or not it has a Y2K problem. And the only advice was to set the calendar to a year 2000 date and see what happens, and hope that the operation is not irreversible. Peter said "Anyone who tells you the Y2k problem was exaggerated wasn't really there. Send him to me. Anyone who says it was incompetence that created the problem in the first place. Send him to me, and I'll show them what it would have cost to store all those digits at 1960's prices for mass storage. And if they say this was a waste of money, send them to me. In a way it was one of the best things that have ever happened. The organizations that handled it well ended up with a much better relationship with the non-technology side of the business. It's nice to be part of the people who make the business run instead of just being seen as a cost center that every now and then comes up with big invoices from IBM."

The next fun thing in the past year was mail bomb viruses. These were, in a way, a product of people who wanted to cooperate with other smart people, instead of being created by people with any real history of putting complex, powerful products out into public market places to be used by possibly unfriendly people and this is a fundamental problem that pervades so many of the things that have gotten IT unwelcome during the last year. We are all really motivated to make things work. We don't tend to invest the time (and are not rewarded) for defining and demonstrating safety against things that might go wrong. The Love Letter virus, Melissa, and the Love Letter clones did not rely on detailed knowledge of funny little implementation bugs, or buffer overflow attacks or debug code that had been left in place. All used published, docu-mented capabilities, APIs, scriptable commands of the software to do simple things like: go look in the address book, find 100 names, mail a copy of a document to those 100 people, and include a script that deletes all jpeg files. (Wiping out the pictures of the summer vacation.) Imagine if anyone had had the subtlety to write something that just flipped every hundredth bit, or changed every fifth addition to a subtraction in a spread sheet. And so again, we get to the end of another year and we are not really able to say anything very encouraging about this. The patch that was released for Outlook after Love Letter that purportedly dealt with some of its glaring security issues really just amounted to saying in code what Microsoft had previously said and probably wishes they had never said on the record, "Well don't look at a Web site if you don't know what's on it". That's a quote. They also used the phrase "Well, you shouldn't take candy from strangers". Great moments in PR.

Which brings us to the subject of the anti-trust suit. The findings of fact document that Judge Jackson produced is a unique piece of work. The judge essentially states as found facts, for example, "It is not realistic to expect that a large body of software would be written for the Java platform and therefore be able to run in any browser independent of underlying operating system". The finding eliminates the need for a whole bunch of venture capitalists to worry about whether they are going to take any entrepreneurial risk in that regard. Appeals Courts tend not to overturn findings of fact, they tend only to address applications of law. And so in that sense by making these competitive analyses and then entering them in the record as findings of fact a lot has been taken out of the purview of what the Appellate Court could look at. You can tell he really didn't like Microsoft very much by the time it was all over. He may have committed reversible error in some of the scathing remarks that were heard from the bench that might later be claimed to indicate bias. I have recommended breakup of Microsoft merely because I think it would make the shareholders a whole lot richer than they will be without it. The problem with the whole case is that they are sort of saying that if you are 90% guilty on each of five criteria then you must be guilty of something - with all this smoke there must be at least one real flame in there somewhere - and I am not sure that the Appeals Court is going to buy it. Of course, It might go straight to the Supreme Court. That would probably be unfortunate because the Supreme Court will skip that whole question, of whether the law is correctly applied, and will be forced to look at the Constitutional issue which is whether or not any antitrust law should exist and whether or not it means anything in the Internet economy. That's really not the question I want to see taken up. People say "Well, how can you punish someone for being successful?". You don't. You tell them when you make up 80% of the market you are required by law to play with different rules and if you don't like that, set up a business in some other country that doesn't have anti-trust law. You either accept the morality of anti-trust law or you don't. The problem is that Microsoft has such a great culture of always acting like they are on the bottom, that they are threatened all the time. The problem is that they never really understood that when you are that big you have to give your employees an annual briefing on how not to become the best target in town for some ambitious young US attorney who would love to paint your company logo on the fender of his BMW. Because that is what we always assumed at Exxon: that there is some US attorney out there who would love to be the guy who nails Exxon to the wall on an anti-trust suit. His name will be in the casebooks for years. It's a way to make a professional reputation."

"The last thing that I want to cover is the increasing involvement in what we do by the Federal Com-munications Commission. Radio spectrum is by definition a finite resource. You can't have five transmitters all on the same frequency using the same stuff. So there has to be legislation, and the FCC. But the FCC is spending an awful lot of its time regulating stuff that clearly is not a matter of finite resource spectrum. If three fiber optic lines going into Ohio are running out of bandwidth I can lay down another. This is not a finite resource, but the FCC is still somehow involved, and I'm not entirely sure why. And Chairman Bill Kenard in September said "Our hands-off approach to the Internet wasn't entirely a choice; the Internet grew so fast that policy makers could not have written a code to govern it even if they had wanted to and that is a very good thing". Well, it's nice to hear them acknowledging that. And yet they are still out there busily writing, by law, competitive analyses of the mobile telephony market. And analyzing things like the availability of broad band service. In most cases we are talking about wires. I am watching cautiously to see what the FCC is going to do, in the manner of all government agencies when their rice bowl is threatened, to find some way to redefine its charter to make themselves continue to be relevant. Their report on broad band access defined the groups who are unlikely to get access to advanced telecommunications services - cable modems if market forces are allowed to control the deployment. These groups are Rural, Urban, Minority, Low Income, Tribal area dwellers, and U.S. Territory dwellers. Now it is much more politically feasible to list these six categories of at-risk users than it would be to boil it down into a once sentence lead for their report which is: "Wealthy suburban whites are first in line for high speed Internet access", but that is of course what this list boils down to when you remove each of those pieces from the map. It is a very nice piece of drafting on their part."

"This is an evening that has gone into very different areas from what I have talked to you about in the last few years. Those have been much more technologically focused in the last few years. I hope most of you aren't too disappointed. It is a symptom of the fact that what we do has become part of people's lives in a way that it really wasn't a few years ago. This talk was much less technical from previous years. The tool has disappeared into the function and computer users are no longer hobbyists, except for the Linux community. Losing your Internet access is like suffering a power failure. IT people need to take stands on issues involving the use of their products. Borderless technology and international sovereignty are a strange mixture."

Peter Coffee had some final comments and predictions: Intel is in deep yogurt. Pentium 4 will have diminishing returns and has real difficulty in handling applications. Intel says you really want a 64-bit Itanium chip. The AMD Athlon chip is currently ahead of Intel (and available), and Alpha and AS400 chips are also available. Wireless is solving the last mile problem. Internet Security-Security business is about to take off. We must have trusted transactions. Amazon as presently constructed will not turn a profit. Amazon will never recover. Wrong plan. Barnes & Noble have reached where Amazon wants to be. FedEx and UPS will make money; dot.coms still have to deliver the merchandise. Cisco is selling picks and shovels in a gold rush, but P = 160 x E is ridiculous.

This was the first meeting of the LA Chapter year and was attended by about 80 persons. Peter Coffee was absolutely superb. Thanks to Mike Walsh who recorded and transcribed the meeting, apologies to Peter Coffee for the (necessary) brevity of this report, and shame on all members who missed this outstanding event.

DATA-LINK Editor.