IT myths keep coming

This week I get the columnist’s equivalent of a free ride. I snag the byline; InfoWorld’s readers supply the content. By way of explanation, two weeks back, I wrote about “The Six Great Myths of IT” and asked for your input on any myths we might have missed. The request struck a chord and I was deluged with suggestions. Herewith, a few of the best.

“The mainframe is dead.” Bill Anderson first heard this in 1977, when he proposed purchase of an IBM 370/158 to management. “One of the execs … suggested … that this was likely to be the last mainframe we would have to buy …. The reality: I just bought four top-of-the-line IBM T-Rex 990s running z/OS.” Senior Programmer Analyst Erik Tornquist concurs: “I believe that IBM’s T-Rex proves this to be another urban legend.”

“Unix is more reliable than Windows.” Reader Tom Pittman “would like to believe it, but my experience does not support it. I really would like to see some stats, though.” Me, too, Tom. In the meantime, consider Brian Fahrlander’s suggested myth, that “Windows has a lower TCO than Linux.” The owner of Freedom Computing writes that “Gartner (in one of its prepaid studies, wink, wink) proved that Microsoft has a lower TCO, as long as the Linux box is running on a $3 million mainframe and the Windows box is on commodity hardware. Quite a stretch.”

“Viruses, worms, and hacking caused up to $226 billion in global damages in 2003.” Rob Rosenberg offers this tidbit (and many similar examples of “computer security hysteria”) from the site Vmyths, which he edits.

And while we’re on the subject of hard-to-support economic claims, how about this statistic from the National Institute of Standards and Technology: “Software errors cost the U.S. economy $60 billion annually.” Parasoft CEO Dr. Adam Kolawa takes issue. “It’s not surprising that many people believe that software is buggy and doesn’t really work,” he says. “However, I’m not convinced. If software were really this bad, how could we function in a society where software controls almost everything — from our communication infrastructure, to our energy infrastructure, to our medical devices, to our means of transportation?”

Software engineer Clifford V. Moravetz offers up the claim that “Eighty percent of your costs are in maintaining software” – a frequently repeated stat. “I’ve often used this [statistic] to underscore the importance of documentation and commenting the code well,” he says. “So is this really true?” Not sure, Clifford, but it evokes another overused catch-all — the ubiquitous 80/20 rule. As Darryl Mataya, a chief development officer, points out, “First it was used to describe resources: 80 percent of your CPU time will be used by 20 percent of your jobs; 80 percent of the cycles will be used by 20 percent of your code; 80 percent of your network traffic will be generated by 20 percent of your users. Now it is used to describe every conceivable management concept. Don’t believe me — Google it! Eighty percent of your management time should be spent on 20 percent of your employees, (or is it the other way around?) 80 percent of your Web traffic comes from 20 percent of your pages, ad nauseam. … It is well known by students of urban legend that a key characteristic of successful legends is un-provability. Ironically, this legend drips it. Not only does it involve separate coefficients on two typically difficult-to-measure values, it has the convenient mathematical characteristic of implying that the two factors are connected by a direct and inverse relationship. Zillions of invisible hands at work all day long on a 4-to-1 lever.”

“Apple is going out of business.” Other related myths cited by reader Jim Kelly include “Macs are not compatible with PCs, Macs are unstable, and [Steve] Jobs is crazy.” Taking a different tack, graphic designer (and Mac fan) Dave West thinks that the most commonly heard Mac untruth is that “Apples never get a virus or break down.” According to West, “The iBook I’m typing this note on has had its logic board … replaced three times in less than two years. I’ve had trouble as a tech department manager and sys admin in every aspect of computing with Apple hardware and software. But I’ve also dealt with the same failures on PCs as well. What Apple really has going for them is their fatal error messages aren’t nearly as scary and glaring as the infamous blue screen of death.”

I also received a pile of myths from the IT trenches, including Kevin Forge’s truism that “Computers prefer to stop working when the technician is not there.” Edward Randall adds the common belief that “systems administrators or IT managers know and understand every piece of software ever written and can fix every problem off the top of their heads.” And Darren Browett observes that “the staff thinks we spend our time reading their e-mail.” Browett adds that his co-workers — in a tongue-and-cheek embellishment of the myth — composed the following questions: “Q: Tell us something about your department. A: Yes we read your e-mail. Q: Tell us how you feel about the other departments. A: They have very boring e-mail. Q: What would you like the other departments to do better? A: Write better e-mails.”

Finally, in my earlier column, I had lamented our inability to debunk the statement that “No one ever got fired for buying IBM.” Well, according to New Zealander Chris LaGrange, the infamous INCIS project, “run by the New Zealand Police in the 90s — with IBM providing consulting, development, and hardware — was such a failure that it has repercussions on government IT projects to this day.” Someone definitely got fired, he says, for buying IBM.

That’s one more myth down, a few thousand to go.