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Application Service Providers: Condemned to Repeat History

By Anonymous

October 15, 2000 — CIO — Change casts a shadow long before it arrives. Sometimes the shadow signals a coming event or a breakthrough of monumental importance, perhaps altering forever the way we work and live.... Most times that shadow is nothing more than a consultant doing finger puppets in pursuit of yet another trip to the trough.

I had a history professor in college of whom I was very fond. Professor Donworth was everything I aspired to be in my golden years: a high-energy, chain-smoking octogenarian with a lightening-quick mind and the vocabulary of a drunken sailor. When he was born, they threw away the mold. (Unfortunately, some of it grew back.) The professor was fond of saying that "what we learn from history is that people never learn anything from history." He didn’t simply believe that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it; he believed that we are condemned to repeat history because we always, always forget. Memories of catastrophic mistakes would be forgotten (at least at an emotional level) within two or three generations. He was saying this in the early ’70s. I’m sure that Professor Donworth, like the rest of us, could not have imagined how the cycle of change has shortened since then, and with it, apparently, so have our memories. We seem now to be on our way to repeating catastrophic errors two or three times in a single generation.

Have you picked up a technology or business magazine lately that didn’t contain yet another tiresome article about the virtues and investment potential of application service providers? Neither have I. When I read these rags, I have the paralyzing suspicion that they’re trying to be funny. Faced with an IPO party about to close the bar and software license revenues in free fall, the investment community and key ERP players have teamed up to bring us the biggest misuse of human energy this side of the WWF (World Wrestling Federation). And the shame of this silly, transparent, embarrassing money grab is that just like the phony solutions that came before (reengineering/downsizing, ERP systems, knowledge management), when this foolishness burns itself out, guess who’ll be left holding the water bag. That’s right, Gunga Din, you! Assuming that you’re not selected to be the sacrificial goat, you’ll be expected to pick up the pieces and once again explain to the powers-that-be that competitive differentiation comes from systems that provide a unique advantage—not from systems that everyone else and their brother have access to.

 

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