There are a lot of things that are simple in principle that are a lot more complicated in reality. International relations. Poverty. The personal problems of other people (who stubbornly refuse to take your advice about ditching that inappropriate spouse, or going to get a real job, or not voting for that dangerous lunatic who's clearly not qualified for an important office).

Somehow the result is always stickier and more complicated than the original situation, though, no matter how clear your instructions were.

The same rule applies to the process of server virtualization—which is more complex that it looks, but not nearly the tar pit of nearly any internecine discussion that includes the phrase "when are you going to quit pretending" or "and grow up."

The principle of virtualization is simple enough when you explain it to the CEO and CFO:

Run more than one server on one server, save money on hardware,; cut back on power consumption; loosen restrictions on the kinds of hardware you can use; make disaster recovery a lot easier and cheaper; reallocate computing resources according to actual demand, not predictions based more on the CFO's need for budget projections than the need of your colleagues for IT resources.

Of course, once the suits understand the principle and potential of virtualization, they have their own priorities:

Reduce the number of servers without buying bigger, more powerful servers first; save even more money on hardware; cut IT's budget for power and A/C; loosen the requirements Purchasing uses to buy servers and save even more money on hardware; cut IT's budget for disaster recovery; cut the part of the IT budget that's based on covering peak demand for bandwidth, compute cycles or software licenses; cut IT's budget for data-center space and support; cut IT's budget for staff to support all that IT they've already cut.

The rule of unintended consequences. Of course, it's not so much a rule as a rueful—a grudging admittance that in human relations, as in nature, any action has an equal and opposite reaction, but not in a form you'd always like.

Intelligence services call it blowback, and hate it for making descriptions of their work sound oxymoronic.

Janco Associates is already predicting that IT salaries will flatten or decline this year. IT hiring is at its lowest level since 2004 and a lot of freezes are already in place, according to Janco's most recent annual IT salary survey. Raises in IT have been lower than the cost of living (which, if CoL includes gas prices, isn't surprising).