ReadWriteWeb’s IT Trends Story a Laughable Exercise

Get with it, ReadWriteWeb. If you’re going to try to wedge your way into the enterprise IT news business, you’d better make a more impressive showing than the silly piece you published Oct. 2 under the byline of Sarah Perez.

The headline is “5 Big Data Center Trends for 2008.” There’s your first mistake.

Um, it’s October. The year is so over.

Points No. 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6: All five trends you write about started at least two years ago. They are hardly trends anymore, since they all are now standard operating procedure.

We’re not going to spend much time and effort on this, but we do want to call this publication into question with some specifics:

1) Blades. Sheesh. IBM, Dell, Sun and HP all launched their new enterprise blade servers in 2006. And those are the second-generationals; the first generation goes back about four years before that.

2) Going green. Double sheesh. This has been on IT’s agenda in widespread implementation since February 2007, with the institution of the Green Grid and the EPA’s green data center program; new “green” products have been coming out regularly in all sectors of IT since then.

3) Virtualization. Virtualization, as a trend in enterprise open systems, started gaining traction about three years ago. New virt technologies were being tested in 2004-05, and they began ramping up big time in enterprises in 2006-07. Too many stories to cite.

4) Cloud computing. This is the most recent hyper-trend, but the cloud-providing and/or -supporting companies like Salesforce.com, Amazon S3 and MozyHome started catching on back in 2004-05, as a new take on the ASPs (application service providers) of 1996-2001.

5) Linux in the enterprise. Please, deliver me! This goes back to about 1998. We’re not even going to bother citing anything here.

Here’s some advice, RWW: Don’t go wading in water that’s way too deep for you. In that case, you’ll have to hold your nose—just as we are doing now.