Behind the headlines: What next-gen IT really needs to know

These days, the business and IT trade press seems to be missing some basic and obvious questions. From the Microsoft Surface to Yahoo to cloud break-ins to the ongoing demise of the personal computer, tech news or analysis has been leaving a lot of fundamental stones unturned.

Some of the currents and concerns behind these stories are integral to the changing face of IT, so missing key questions does you a disservice. To that end, here are the missing questions and how they’re relevant to next-generation IT (except for a few that aren’t, but annoyed me too much to ignore).

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With that in mind, here is an IT geezer’s perspective on the latest headlines, complete with questions I’m pretty sure most of you have wondered about — especially as they pertain to IT moving forward. I’ll even provide some answers.

The real litmus test for Microsoft Surface

If Microsoft has accomplished anything by announcing Surface, it is that for the first time ever people are thinking of Microsoft as a serious tablet contender, with significant potential for next-gen IT. If Windows 8 turns out to be a decent tablet OS, its integration into the enterprise architecture will be orders of magnitude easier than any non-Windows-based alternative.

But the big uncovered story about the forthcoming Microsoft-branded Windows 8 tablet is that its success hinges almost entirely on Microsoft’s App Store attracting developers willing to sell their wares for the sub-$10 price tag Apple has established in its App Store. After all, without Apple’s App Store, the iPad would be little more than a very pricey and inefficient mirror.

The next-gen IT question(s): Will the Microsoft App Store be curated, and if so, will it be curated well? Either way, how easy will it be for enterprise IT to hook in its own App Store to provide employees with tested and approved apps they can rely on?

Meanwhile, lots of commentators are making a very big deal about Microsoft selling hardware as well as software, thereby competing with its channel partners, some of which are throwing public tantrums.

Are you as puzzled as I am that nobody has opined about Google’s Nexus tablet, which runs on Google’s own Android OS and competes with Google’s channel partners? If there’s a large difference between Google and Microsoft when it comes to selling hardware that competes with channel partners, it has yet to be adequately explained.

What it will take for Mayer to turn around Yahoo

Yahoo hired Marissa Mayer away from Google to be its new CEO — an announcement that generated lots of coverage about Mayer, her abilities, what she’s done for Google, and whether losing her will hamper Google’s long-term success.

Here are the questions everyone I know who doesn’t write for the business press has asked me: Isn’t she covered by a noncompete clause, and if so, how can she take the job with Yahoo? If she isn’t, why isn’t she? This is, after all, a standard precaution with highly placed executives. What gives?

What gives is that while none of the major news outlets and trade pubs discussed the matter, according to Law.com, California law prohibits such actions. There’s no story here, folks. Move along.

More interesting with respect to Yahoo is what Mayer might do to turn it around. From my view, she has four alternatives: semantic search, source scoring, turning Yahoo into a media company, and scoring a few years of big paychecks while Yahoo continues its slide into irrelevance.

Semantic search is Yahoo’s killer opportunity. If Yahoo’s searches delivered what you’re interested in instead of content that contains your search terms, it would be game, set, and match for Yahoo.

If Google hasn’t cracked semantic search by now, Mayer won’t have the chops to crack it at Yahoo, so her best shot is a longshot: Sweet-talking IBM into licensing its Watson technology for that purpose. Otherwise, any search engine will do, and which one it is won’t matter. Microsoft’s Bing proved that a more-or-less-as-good-as-your-entrenched-competitor doesn’t gain you market share.

Yahoo’s other play for winning in the search game is “source scoring” — rating sites on the reliability of the information they provide. When you search for information, wouldn’t you appreciate having an independent rating authority rank the search results in order of their trustworthiness? Yahoo could gain a lot of search eyeballs with that little feature — providing it would be labor-intensive. But that’s a plus, because labor-intensivity creates a very big barrier to entry for any competitors.

Then there’s the third alternative: becoming a media company, a concept boosted by Mayer’s predecessor Ross Levinsohn. That would seem to make the most sense; after all, there aren’t very many media companies on the Internet to compete with. Oh, wait.

My money is on alternative No. 4: Collect a few years of big paychecks without making a difference.

What Apple’s iCloud security snafu really tells us about the cloud

The big cloud story last week was hacking. Both Dropbox and iCloud were nailed. In the case of iCloud, the intruder called Apple’s help desk posing as the victim, gained access through a password reset, and proceeded to wipe the victim’s iCloud data, which, through the miracle of synchronization, propagated to all the user’s other devices, wiping them clean, too.

What has been discussed is the usual tired “we need better security in the cloud” narrative. It’s true. It’s still tired.

Also mentioned, but deserving a spotlight, is how Apple’s customary arrogance contributed to the situation. Apple apparently doesn’t think it has to adhere to the minimum standards of basic information security competence because, as it turns out, if you can provide an email address and the last four digits of a credit card number — you know, the ones everyone figures it’s safe to print — Apple’s help desk will give you access to anyone’s iCloud account. Warn your users. They’ll thank you for it.

What’s been completely ignored is what both episodes reveal about the difference between IT- and cloud-based provisioning — namely, in-house IT provides services we all used to take for granted. It’s called “back up and restore.”

I don’t get it. With all of Apple’s technology, the guy couldn’t just say to his iPhone, “Siri, restore all of my data from backup”? He certainly could ask any help desk in the world for this — any help desk that’s part of even last-gen internal IT, that is — and count on an affirmative response.

Speaking of your IT generation: If, as part of becoming next-gen, you think you have to endorse cloud-based storage, go ahead … after your due diligence confirms that backup and restore is part of the service. Otherwise, bite the bullet and provide it yourself. Otherwise, you’ll be blamed if anything goes wrong, even if you were nowhere near the place.

Death of the PC, one more time

Once again, the PC’s days are numbered. The latest version of this tired story is a Gartner report projecting “flat or single-digit growth” in PC sales compared to higher levels in the tablet and smartphone segments.

I’m not sure how single-digit growth constitutes a death knell. Yes, the PC marketplace is largely saturated, driven more by the need for replacements and avoidance of obsolescence than by nonusers becoming new users. That matters if you’re picking stocks to invest in.

What people look to research firms like Gartner for is help with their internal IT planning, not their investment portfolio. Assuming that’s you, ignore this empty trend-spotting. You’ll be managing just about the same number of PCs next year as last year, taking into account staff growth or shrinkage as the business succeeds or slumps. They’ll be doing pretty much the same things, too — their role in your technical architecture will be just as significant as it is now, no matter your IT gen. Next-gen IT won’t be PC-less.

The smartphone and tablet marketplaces, in contrast, are growing. Especially among tablets in the halls of business, the iPad’s market share is probably still a distant second to doing nothing yet (which is why Microsoft might be able to sell a lot of ’em).

Yes, if you haven’t yet put together a strategy for incorporating tablets and smartphones into your enterprise technical architecture, you’re way behind schedule. But if you think you also need to plan for unplugging your PCs, no, you don’t. That might be what Gartner’s analysts are suggesting, but it isn’t what its data says.

Which brings up the final question that hasn’t been answered in the trade press until now: What would you do without me?

This story, “Behind the headlines: What next-gen IT really needs to know,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bob Lewis’ Advice Line blog on InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.