A couple of days back, while going through Google news, I came across two headlines – “Blackberry network squashed“, “Intuit overwhelmed by last-minute tax filers“. Wow! Blackberry is a kind of lifeline of thousands of corporate users. Intuit’s Turbo Tax is used by again thousands of taxpayers to file their returns. That the services which Big Money is dependent on goes down for hours together without giving as much as a clue is apocryphal in it’s imagination.

What would happen if still critical services get affected similarly – Stock Markets, Salesforce, Google, Microsoft !!??? Wtf! Go back … Google !!!!! What would I do ? How do I look up the documentation? Where do I check my mails? How do I contact my customer ? How do I make money ???? That possibility looks bleak but nevertheless, even the possibilities of Blackberry going down looked very unlikely.

Any solution ? Yes. One, close all these new fangled technology enablers and go back to the old times where you could enjoy reading about those breakdowns in tomorrow morning’s newspaper while sipping coffee. Sounds difficult. Very difficult. We’ve to move ahead in time

But that is a possibility and we have to address the possibilty somehow. Nationalise Google … LoL … again impossible. People trust current Google more than the American Government !!

The technical issues are bound to exist. The business issues are not at all going to go away. Here are a couple of thoughts on the above:

* Monopolies are BAD!! The bigger they are, the harder the fall might be.
* Distributed profit centers with Shared cost centers a la Cooperatives should be better to handle the situation.
* The techniques and processes should be in the open. Let’s assume X Corp patented a particular way of installing a patch without using tape/optic/network drives. Google may be able to use that idea and innovate it further to setup the processes in a cost effecive way. Again put it back amongst Academicians, the idea may filter out as an open source solution, thus benefiting thousands of projects world wide as well.

The Moral of this sad story should be “Break monopolies, build on standards, franchise your infrastructure”.