Leadership By Numbers :: Looking Back at My Biggest Mistakes for 2008

Category Administration Open Source
Predictions are as boring as NASCAR racing with a Toyota Prius fleet. Real lessons in life come from the crashes and their tragedy. Here's my year of what-didn't-happen as I had thought it would:

Mobile Web caught me more by surprise, and I had to really work to get a grip on it's implications. The breach in the Enterprise came from Apple's iPhone, which I didn't see as meeting IT standards, so I thought it would have minimal impact. I was absolutely steamrolled by the consumer demand for iPhone integration.
Virtualization is much more interesting than I had understood. Because I've built and used VM's from WMWare, Microsoft and Sun, I saw it more as consolidation of hardware resources. VDI and mobile VMs are changing my mind as what to expect from virtualization.
Apple Macs just can't be stamped out fast enough, can they? These are premium products in terms of their cost, but also in what they deliver. I mis-gauged their rise in popularity because of their expense. However, Vista's many disappointments laid a rail-track right to Apple. Today, desktop and laptop users are riding the Apple line.
Cloud Computing is, well, a good metaphor for itself: large, hard to define the borders, and the security is hazy. I was initially enamored by the concept, and some of the initial offerings. Now, I'm thinking that Cloud Computing could become the hedge funds of IT.
What is happening with Sun Microsystems ? It seems like they can turn gold in straw faster than a cold-fusion power plant. The Glassfish Enterprise Server, open-source Java, and MySQL just aren't doing anything for them.
IM and video collaboration are more difficult to bring into business processes than I thought they would be. It's hard enough creating a culture for e-mail as business communication, but video is still slow to move forward.
Open-source and open-standard adoption is failing to move in to the enterprise at a rate I had considered likely. I believe the low acceptance is really a response to the ease of which a successful test case can be made. I can set up a LAMP server in minutes, but the transition into large-scale deployment occurs at the same pace of commercial and proprietary offerings. Complexity can't be rushed.