Interesting article about how Toronto is approaching it’s goal of becoming a world-class city.
It caught my eye, because it talks about the experiences of my adopted home city, Manchester:
“‘He likes to cite Manchester, a decaying industrial city whose inner core was destroyed by an IRA bomb 10 years ago this summer. That catastrophe has led, not to despair, but to a shimmering rebirth… ‘They have created an environment in which the European banks are flooding in and 20,000 people have come to live in their downtown in the past 10 years. All kinds of new cultural attractions have opened up, new public spaces have opened up.’”
Every Mancunian I’ve spoken to says the IRA bomb (important note – there were no fatalities, and few injuries) was the best thing to happen to Manchester. It’s certainly changed it’s physical and social infrastructure in the few years I’ve been here…the landscape is like Tokyo in the early 80′s…these fantastic skeletal frames of cranes and half constructed towers.
There’s a wider theme of ‘creative destruction’ that I’ve thought about for many years – and the parallels to any significant, embracing social and/or technical change – particularly in the ‘IT’ industry. Or rather, the leap-frogging of the shackles of supporting legacy – and the freedom and innovation that leapfrogging legacy infrastructure (and mindsets!) can bring.
I’m particularly fascinated by how many ‘developing’ (I hate that term) countries are completely bypassing fixed line infrastructure and jumping straight to cellular infrastructures – and combining this with a leap-frog over the old phases of agrarian -> industrialisation -> services, straight to the services bit…
But that’s not really destruction, but shows how fast-moving, societies and businesses can implement change if they _don’t need to worry about supporting legacy_
In the computer industry, I see entire companies’ capability for innovation bogged down in their requirement to support legacy infrastructure. In one instance, my client’s retail environments were completely hobbled by reliance on legacy frame relay (i.e. slow, but secure) network connectivity. In some stores, they’re now using 3G cards plugged into laptops – bypassing the legacy connectivity altogether.
And look at the desktop IT environment – a legacy environment if I ever saw one. And there’s such an obvious metaphor for web applications leapfrogging the desktop environment. I mean, think about the ‘average’ office worker – what can they do now, that they can’t do via a web application. Only with instantaneous sharing. IT departments are moving towards looking after screens with connections and little else.
And that’s a good thing…the web creates a destructive platform legacy IT.
Jason Kottke (who I got the link to the Toronto story) wrote about the emergence of the Desktop/Web operating system
I think one of my defining moments in ‘IT’ was my enthusiasm for Userland’s Radio, one of the most innovative apps I’d seen. An embedded desktop webserver, shared outlining, blog publishing engine in a few mb’s of dead-simple installer…but it was doomed in the standard workplace…any client I mentioned it to had a desktop policy that prevented them from installing anything…
…and the loss of creativity, knowledge sharing and emergent expertise from that failure of legacy IT environments has stuck with me ever since…
Give me a web app, and fuck the IT department – they’re getting in people’s way.