“The legends abound of those who have started with nothing and made millions in a few short years.”
Some have likened the development of IT to the development of the railroads or the industrial revolution. However, when describing the Web a better analogy may be the American wild west. The Web is characterised by a spirit of lawlessness and anarchy, that many believe must be maintained in order to allow it to develop freely and fully. While corporates try to take control of their IT environments in order to make them more predictable and regulated, the frontiers of technology are untamed lands. The World Wide Web could perhaps more appropriately be called the Wild West Web.
As we all know, if you want to survive in the wild west you had better be a gun-toting cowboy. Sometimes it seems almost every IT professional I speak to has some mercenary rustling project on the side that they hope is going to make their fortune. The legends abound of those who have started with nothing and made millions in a few short years.
The Web is still undeveloped, where the equivalent of a saloon is considered major infrastructure and most participants have cruised into town on the back of a horse with nothing but the clothes they’re wearing: the barriers to entry are very low. So low that Ted C. Fishman in his book China Inc. describes a new breed of Chinese entrepreneur who, despite living in shanties and having nothing but the most basic of computer skills, are able to develop global businesses. Riding the eBay horse they can, for instance, repackage old and unwanted home wares as valuable antiques to be sold to wealthy city folk.
Of course, this ain’t no one-horse town, and in this case the horses come in all sorts of different shapes and colours. You may have noticed for instance, the many cowboys taking a ride on the Google horse —Google advertisements seem to be appearing everywhere. There’s a good reason for this: the new advertising model means that anyone with a Web site can start to make advertising revenue just by filling out a form. It seems you don’t even have to own a horse to be a cowboy; you just need to saddle up and hang on.
Actually, you don’t even really have to be a cowboy at all; you just have to look like one. One industrious friend of mine (whose name I’ve promised to conceal, lest a bounty be put on his head) started using software to automatically generate tens of thousands of new Web pages on myriad topics using content already available elsewhere on the Web. He then added Google advertisements to these pages. Obviously, the quality of these pages wasn’t great, but he saw it as a numbers game. Indeed, a tiny percentage of Web users did go to these pages, a small percentage of these users clicked on the associated Google advertisements and, just as the renegade hoped, he was soon buying the whisky rounds for everyone. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that he has a daytime job as a trader in the money market, where cowboys have ruled for years.
And of tomorrow’s IT professionals? I spoke to some of my university students about Internet entrepreneurs and they had their own legends to tell—most of them revolved around cowboys making windfalls from developing SPAM, spyware or porn sites! Clearly, altruism is not high on the agenda of tomorrow’s IT leaders: they’re shooting first and asking questions later. Of course if you don’t fancy being on the wrong side of the law, I’ve heard that openings for Sheriffs come up pretty damn regularly.
Gerald Khoury consults, lectures and writes in IT strategy and planning.
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