Psychologists tell us that our "self view" lags several years, how we physically and emotionally see our selves lags to our prior self.  Management training is that it takes people several months to start performing a new job, they tend to perform thier old one for a while.
And so todays rant is about some things that we still see in the old light, but have clearly changed - what we spend our IT dollars on....


Reliability
Folks will pay for reliabilty.  Ask Toyota how they won over the US car market.  Ask yourself why people pay a premium for Apple MaCs and Ipods - they just work, and the customer experience is nicer.  I gladly paid more for a camry in the 90s so I would not have to deal with car breakdowns.  And so it goes with IT equipment - lowest price is not going to win.  The internet, electricity, compute cycles critical to your business - part of thier compelling attractiveness is they are always there.

Try going for a few days without electricity or your cell phone.

The counter to this is, folks won't suffer un reliability, given other options.  Ubuntu is an option, Mac OSx, Linux, Solaris, and people are using them in droves to gain reliability.

I am reminded of the joke the Navy flight deck crews tell the pilots as they close the hatch, just prior to catapulting the jet and pilot off the deck  - "Remember, each component is built by the lowest bidder..."  Not something you want to tell your CEO when they ask how their IT infrastructure decisions are made....

And on the people side, someone on my staff that I can count on 99% of the time, is more valauable than a 50% hit and miss genius.  Well, in most cases.

Support
Look at how much we spend on monthly support, on IT.  Initial purchase costs of hardware and software (often 0) are dropping all the time.  The cell phone, the server, the database,  the OS, are free - - its the support you are willing to pay for.  And its really nice (Thanks Larry Ellison) when more than one company offers it - price and performance competition is a great thing for the end customer.

Energy - power
Lets plot some data center costs- 1970 - 2007
First plot the cost of a CPU cycle, 1 floating pt instruction.
Then the cost of RAM, 1 MB.
Then the cost of Disk, 100MB.
Then the cost of Tape, 10Tb.

Then the cost of Electricity, or power, say - the price of a gallon of gas or a barrel of oil.

Extend the curves.

It is a clear certainty, that IT spending will be dominated by energy and support costs. No question of if, only when.

And it may have already happened, and we are just getting around to noticing it.