It’s DevOps and Gluten-Free!

It happens every time.

Maybe that’s why people tend to get grumpy after 40. We’ve seen this crap so many times that it gets kinda boring.

A new tech or a new way of thinking (or both) comes up.

It gets bashed over and over by status quo.

It makes its way into developers’ mindset.

It takes over the world.

Status quo notices business opportunity (after everyone else did).

Status quo jumps into the “cool” bandwagon, states it has supported it from the very start and that it is a now a leader of “whatever-this-is”.

I remember Oracle CEO trash-talking the whole cloud business. I remember Ballmer calling open-source software “anti-american”. I remember a bunch of clowns saying that Linux distros could be found on cereal boxes. I remember when RUP was born, when Rational was bought by IBM and the lost decade that came afterwards — such a mess that the Agile movement was welcomed eagerly.

Now everyone is in cloud business. DevOps is an easy sales pitch, a juicy word that any idiotic sales guy can abuse over and over. We see the same old IT vendors offering crappy and expensive services that nobody cares about.

But, hey, they’re coming: salespeople on mid-priced suits and badly-chosen ties, boasting about their support and lying (a lot) on previous successes: “my product is DevOps and gluten-free”. Everybody is a “leader” with “highest growth”.

Let me tell you something, big old IT vendors: the whole cloud business exists despite your efforts. You fought against it and you lost. Badly.

This is the first time ever on IT business that money is flowing into the hands of those who actually deliver what they sell.

Remember those expensive “software suites” with 90% of useless crap that got in the way of the 10% that might be useful? They’re dead. Vendor lock-in? Gone. Nobody falls for that bullshit anymore. Remember those support contracts that took $400/hour in order to answer in weeks that a certain bug is “by design”? Gone.

The cloud business is a new commodity — “tsunami-tech” like Docker is wiping off the world any lock-in strategy, and smart customers are even considering multi-cloud choices.

So here is the deal: deliver or die. So, please, play nice or step aside.

And get rid of those cheap ties.