Service Disruption

I recently read an article regarding "Crowd Sourcing" and its effect on the traditional service support model. The example presented was the use of CS to provide support for Intuit. The amazing thing is that the model of CS is community based and the people providing support are compensated in no way (they just want to be helpful). The support they provided was better than the support provided by Intuit through their email and phone services.

Think about it, develop a product, make it ubiquitous, develop enhancements, BUT, let the user base provide the support necessary. If you run a for profit business see how the service cost is removed from the bottom line.

This portends a change in service for the future. I can see a pay-per-use service model that can assist internal support organizations in providing technical support in areas where they may not have the detailed knowledge to fix the problem. So, vendors fund the model, certify the expertise, create the referral model, and let the users determine the costs the market will bear.

So, who wants to fund me?

Bits, Bytes, and TERABYTES

I received a recent email at my company account that mentioned the following:

Software is everywhere. For example, a cell phone contains 2 million lines of code and a vehicle, 35 million.

The message shows that the real driver of systems growth in terms of processing power and memory is software; created by programming languages or development environments that do not concern themselves with efficiency, just functionality. I am not saying this is wrong, it is just a function of the times we live in; develop code, test, and deploy. The market demands functionality and memory is cheap so develop and deploy because we must respond and our goal is a quick "time to market".

What if we were to examine this code and remove superfluous statements; what would we save and how much faster would the application be? A point to ponder.