Author's Note: Please see Part 1 of this interview with Dr. Putnam in last month's Microsoft Computing column.

MC Press: Dr. Putnam, where do you think the business world is going to go in the next five years or so? Are we going to continue to...

Dr. Jeff Putnam: (Laughing) Are we going to continue to use Microsoft? Yes, we are but there are areas where we are not. Linux has really been taking over on the servers, already. And, in fact, Linux runs SMB shares faster than Windows does. So Linux as a server solution is really a sensible kind of thing to do.

Linux on the desktop? I'm not convinced as yet. But it's not that there's anything wrong with Linux--the problem is that the people who are sitting at the desks aren't interested in learning anything new. They have a solution, and they don't want to learn another one.

MC: So you feel a migration to Linux would require the desktop user to learn new applications?

JP: Yeah, it would.

MC: They couldn't just migrate to "Word for Linux," for example?

JP: Yes, they could use essentially "Word for Linux," which is "Open Office" for Linux, which looks a lot like Word, feels a lot like Word in most cases, but the perception is "Gee, my desktop doesn't look right. Where's my Start button? Where's my old screen layout? It just doesn't look right." Desktop users are very, very resistant to change. Many barely understand what they're doing as it is; they don't want to understand anything new.

The real changes are going to come in the substrata. The infrastructure. The server level, substantially. Microsoft has proven that they are not good at building server-level stuff, except for things like shared calendars. And that only works over a small organization. In large organizations, it just doesn't go. For example, how many calendars can you overlay before is just becomes meaningless?

And another thing [about collaborative systems] is that it's one of those things where you get 20 people using it, well, that's one thing. You get 500 people dealing with it, it's probably OK. You get 10,000 people dealing with it from, you know, different places across the country, using different speed lines and whatever, and it just doesn't manage to keep up. For example, in a large organization, internal email systems tend to become less and less effective. Users receive dozens of meaningless messages--from the joke of the day to "I'll be on vacation till Monday"--that they ignore them all and discard the entire bunch, unread, about once a week.

And there's been this whole thing lately, this question of "Does IT matter?"--one of these big questions that have been floating up and around in the technological community for a bit. IT matters so much! It's essential for anybody; you've got to have IT. The problem is we're spending lots and lots of energy at maintaining these desktops. Again, it goes back to the thin client thing. You've got, for instance, 100 desktops in your building or organization, whatever, and so you have to maintain 100 different machines, each one of which someone has tweaked in some way to do something slightly different, or has a different version of Windows or Word or Excel. It gets to be a nightmare. A given user may want to stay with Windows 98 because they will then be compatible with some piece of software--maybe on a customer's or a vendor's machine.

Consider the total cost of ownership for desktop systems. It's incredible. I remember looking at it at one point, and it was something like $20,000 per year per desktop system for moderately sized organizations. And approximately $10,000 of that was for dealing with viruses and bugs. And we can't count on things like viruses and bugs happening all the time, but when it does happen, it's catastrophic. And a thin client doesn't solve that problem, but it alleviates it to a great extent. Because if you get a virus into your thin client servers, it's on one or two machines, rather than being on 500 machines or 5000 machines. Of course, if the single server gets infected, then all the clients go down as well, but typically that's an easier problem to solve, because you actually maintain that one server better.

The thin client model solves other problems as well, such as address mapping across a firewall, and you can actually get people to run their browser remotely. Like with X Windows, you can run your browser on the server. And what that actually would do is, you know, you can then proxy things, you can cache better, you can filter out the porn sites, you can do all those things you're supposed to do better from a single server because you have a single point of contact with the world.

The downside is it takes more knowledge to run the server--things like security administration, disaster recovery, capacity planning, passing an EDP audit. Most of these MSCE types don't know how to do that. You can't really pack a real IT department or program with MSCE types...'cause they don't know what they're doing...unfortunately.

MC: Given the plight of the typical IT professional in a medium-sized organization, what should one do to stay in touch with the industry?

JP: Well, you're probably not going to like the answer, but the very least they should do is learn to enjoy learning. This is way too big a field that's changing way too quickly, and nobody knows how to forecast it. None of us do. I wish we did. There are so many things changing out there. Yeah, the image I have that I kind of like is you can imagine that you are surfing on it. What you really have to do is sort of stay at the top of the wave and watch from that overview where you can get a decent look, but you can't look down too terribly deeply. You have to look in front of you, and you have to just keep on going and keep up. Because if you ever get lost, you're going to be swallowed. There's a whale under there waiting for you.

You have to keep up. You have to keep reading the literature. You have to browse Web sites all the time in order to find out what's happening.

An IP professional today should find some part of their organization's operations, some feature of what your organization is doing that interests you, one way or another, and become an expert on it. But don't become an expert by saying, "I'm going to go off and study this and become an expert." That's usually not the right way to do it. Become an expert in something because you're interested in it. It has to be something you're interested in because it's your interest that will drive your study of it. And make it a point to do this regularly.

If you've got a decent employer, they'll give you the time to do it, because they'll see that there will be value for them in it in the long run. It doesn't even matter if it's not directly related to what you're doing. Pick something, and become an expert because it interests you, not because you're thinking, "Gee, I need to protect my job." If you do that--if you do that well--even if your job goes away, you'll be able to find another one by being an expert in these areas. The jobs are out there; it's just a matter of matching the right talent to the right requirement.

But you've got to keep up. You've got to make learning not just something that's a priority but something that's fun, something you do because you enjoy that process and because you're really getting something out of it. And as long as you're doing that, you'll always be valuable to people. You know, maybe not your current employer, but somebody.

MC: Today, IT departments are typically facing budget reductions....

JP: Well, it might mean a career change. It might mean you end up, you know, moving from this IT program to becoming the person that supports 10 computers for a school up in the middle of the mountains someplace. For those of us that want to live in the middle of the mountains, this might be a good thing....

And the budgets might not necessarily be reduced meaningfully. Often, IT budgets are reduced conveniently. And IT is often one of the first groups to get hit. But the problem is and what they haven't realized is that IT is not being used correctly. And I think that's the biggest thing: We are not using this technology well. We're hiring more people to do input. We're hiring people to input entire documents in Word. And if you have to create a whole document from scratch in Word, it can take you awhile. If you have a template in XML, if you do the template so you can just fill in the right slots, that's much easier. We need to build templates for these documents. We don't do that very much.

And this is really IT's responsibility. We need to find the relationships, the commonalities; we need to find the places where we can reuse this stuff. You know, we often talk about software reuse, but we don't talk about this sort of software by-product reuse.

And obviously we can't persuade the bosses of that because they want to keep their secretaries and administrative assistants. But their secretary is probably the person that needs to get fired.

Even here, in the computer science department of a state university, technology is being used badly. I watch people edit things by hand that they should not have to edit by hand. The other day, for example, I got a university phone listing as a Microsoft Word document that should really have been in a comma-delimited text file. I can't use a Microsoft Word document. If the list came as a delimited file I could put it into a Web page, I could search on it, I could put it into a database, I could do a number of things with it, but no--it's in Word. Word is the wrong solution.

And that's where we're going. We're building these wrong solutions, and we're doing it over and over again. How long did it take to input all that data? And to format all the columns, set the fonts, justify the text, etc.? And what really should be done is put the data into a comma-separated text file--you know, last name, first name, department, etc.--and store the file in one and only one place. And this is common in organizations. So the IT person that goes in and figures out, "Ahh...can I make my organization smarter?" That's where the changes are going to be made.

Chris Peters has 26 years of experience in the IBM midrange and PC platforms. Chris is president of Evergreen Interactive Systems, a software development firm and creators of the iSeries/400 Report Downloader. Chris is the author of The OS/400 and Microsoft Office 2000 Integration Handbook, The AS/400 TCP/IP Handbook, AS/400 Client/Server Programming with Visual Basic, and Peer Networking on the AS/400 (MC Press). He is also a nationally recognized seminar instructor. Chris can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..