Natural selection

Jon Udell has noticed a split in the IT blogging world between those who stick with it and those who bail out. The same happened in the online magazine space. I found myself sharing tables at major vendor briefings with some college kids writing IT reviews and analysis between classes. A few of those Web publications (what hardware vendors call “enthusiast sites”) are still cranking out great content and remain on my regular reading list. Most, however, will be consolidated out through what Jon calls "the link economy."

Blogspace is an especially compelling case of an engineered organization. The technology brutally and automatically selects out the incompetent, irrelevant, and dishonest. Jon and I debate about whether blogspace is naturally impervious to corruption. It certainly has a built-in resistance to it. It is an engineered community that’s worth studying as a model even if you’re not a fan of blogs as a business tool.

Focusing the concept of selection down to the technology level, Novell’s Winston Bumpus promotes a simple sniff test for determining the relevance of an emerging standard: It saves you money, it makes you money, or it’s mandated by the government. Short and sweet, perfectly distilled, that phrase should be the standard. If the Bumpus Principle or a comparably simple equivalent were applied to every technology in place at every company, IT infrastructures would become much stronger.

Selection can be steered, pulled one way or another by a powerful interest. This is a stellar opportunity to knock off a competitor and shrug off ethical questions: Hey, it wasn’t us. It was natural consolidation. The market made an adjustment that just happened to work in our favor.

I don’t see this kind of misuse succeeding in the long term. What gives me the most hope is the increasing number of successful, brilliant, small vendors and the greater visibility of internal think-tank projects. Three pet examples of this from my recent experience are Raxco, Newisys, and HP Zero-Latency Enterprise (ZLE). Raxco is a little company that makes a powerful disk defragmenter for Windows. Newisys designed the reference platform for AMD’s Opteron 64-bit CPU. HP’sZLE project is a real-time storage, messaging, and retrieval system that’s obviously the right way to manage massive amounts of rapidly changing data.

I’ll write more about each of these in future columns, but I am constantly surprised by the innovation that is rising to the top after being invisible for a long time. Natural selection has a way of bringing the strongest to the front of the herd.