I'm in the midst of reading Ubik by Phillip K. Dick.
Here is an interesting theme from the book: people pay for a great many things as a service, instead of owning the use of those things outright. Many of the instances in the book are a bit silly for us in 2016 - a coin operated door to an apartment, for instance. But we have the benefit of an additional 45 years of history and science that PKD did not have in 1969, when Ubik was published.
Today there are a lot of things that we pay for in an ongoing way (albeit not with coins) - phones, books, music, computing power, automobiles, genealogy information, etc.
Phillip K. Dick was able to imagine a version of our electronic, service-based, cloud technology world well before any of it existed.
That he got some of the implementation details wrong is hardly surprising, given when he was writing.
A lot of old science fiction gets those sort of details wrong. It can be hard to look past those limitations sometimes - it's easy to focus on coin-operated doors or old special-effects technologies. But if you do, really good sci-fi gets a lot of things right. Heck, sometimes even bad sci-fi gets a few things right.
It's a healthy exercise in ignoring details when the details aren't the thing that matters - what mattered then (as now) was imagination and storytelling. PKD got those things very right a lot of the time.
Also, if you are ever in Ft. Morgan, CO, USA, you can visit Phillip K. Dick's grave. It is located in Riverside Cemetery. The people there are happy to help show you where his grave is located. He is buried with his twin sister who died when she was an infant.
I have heard from some parties that the cloud technology offerings that are gaining traction now (Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services) are going to bring about the "death of IT".
First of all this is a big overstatement. Next, I also think these technologies are actually going to be net job creators, and not just for developers.
This is true because more small companies can afford to build-out infrastructure and therefore we will have more technology startups, which will create more jobs.
I also think that existing IT jobs likely aren't going anywhere either. These environments (Azure, Google Cloud, AWS) are complicated and it takes a good IT professional to learn them, set them up correctly, and manage them. There is a lot to learn here, so A) people need to go learn it and B) smart people need to be in charge of managing it in the long run.
And, interestingly where there were basically two flavors of IT in the past (Windows and Linux) now you have 3 - Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. Even though Amazon and Google are based largely on Linux, the two service offerings are not the same thing. They have different services, different UI, different structures. To be an expert in one is not to be an expert in the other.
To me this is nothing but good news from a competitive standpoint (3 options vs. 2 options) but also from a job creation and economic perspective.
The other good news? Since these platforms actually run VMs in a lot of cases, your existing IT expertise will still be applicable as well.
Virtualization probably has had a negative effect on jobs thus far, but the next stage will almost certainly create jobs, and opportunity, for those willing to learn and pick up new skills.
Jonathan Fries on .