Real World Computing
Big fish, little fish
The world is divided into two types - those who divide the world into two types and those who don't - which is why I'm an iTunes-hater despite being a Macintosh lover. The tunes I listen to and the way I collect them into my day's entertainment has absolutely nothing to do with the quasi-racial categories and advertising-led fiefdoms that American radio stations use to pigeonhole music for the consumer, and which provide the genre labels for iTunes. Is it R&B, house, hard house, electrofunk, indie? I really don't give a damn. I'd love to see what such an obsessive categoriser makes of Les Mystere des Voix Bulgares, for example.
You may have noticed that such categorisers absolutely hate to re-categorise anything: their first list is their only list. To nitpick, or worse still to paradigm-shift, the field in question, whether music, food, car brand or greenness, is to venture into the scary place where intellect gives way to emotion. Category busting isn't greeted with curiosity or a readiness to rationally criticise your choices: instead, the left brain takes over, stridently crying "sacrilege, heresy, flim-flam". Of course, not all categorisers are nutjobs. For example, biology is currently going through a revolution thanks to DNA sequencing. Species were once grouped by fur, size, habitat and so on, but it turns out the environment can make quite different species look the same. However, DNA gives them away.
When is such a revolution coming for the computer trade? I've talked here before about the absurdity of some of the trade's categorisation of devices intended for "small businesses": often it's a synonym for "doesn't really work", "whatever you do, don't try to change anything", or "makes money for small computer salesmen". A couple of recent conversations reminded me that there are few areaswhere the categories so poorly match the actual needs of buyers than networks, and especially network switches. Imagine if all our cars had to have their speedos marked in Roman numerals in honour of our dear ex-emperor Hadrian. We've moved on since then, some of us a very long way indeed, but the instincts of the categorisers - "Small Office or Home Office, sir? Or perhaps Telecommuter?" - are shamelessly harnessed to vendors' needs to keep their product ranges rolling forward, to make last year's buyer feel lost without this year's hot new toy.
Networking presents several big stumbling blocks for salesmen, who on the one hand want us to keep spending and, on the other, want to clearly demarcate the little fish from the big fish. The big dirty secret, and whisper it very quietly indeed, is that not much has changed in networking technology over the last five years (and, more arguably, over the last ten). I'd have to admit, very softly, that the pace of change has slowed considerably in those networking marketplaces outside the Telco and Enterprise sectors. A length of Category 5e unshielded twisted-pair laid in your building in 1996 was still moving millions of bits a week at the same Gigabit Ethernet rate in 2006, and very probably will be in 2016 and 2026, too. Several companies had a go at keeping the pace of change on the boil by introducing Cat 6 connectors and frames (those connectors that looked like half of one of your kid sister's broken hairclips), but they failed to come anywhere near the desktop. I challenge you to find me a networked PC with a Cat 6 connection to its network card. Once Gigabit Ethernet had migrated from copper to fibre, that was about it for innovation. I might even argue that enterprise-level networks have actually changed more slowly still, but that would only be true where the WAN hits the desktop: inside their server rooms, e-commerce is stirring up a howling tornado of innovation inside most big operations.
