Went to a meeting of our local software developer’s alliance…a new organization which has been sponsored by our local community and economic development people. First meeting I’ve been to, and it looks promising.  We had a funny presentation though, by a representative of the Meta Group. (soon to be aquired by Gartner Group). This is a business which has as a slogan Driving Pervasive Integration Through IT Innovation.

Ok…well, the speaker gave a PowerPoint presentation (several times she stood directly in front of the projector) and spent considerable time explaining how the great technology crash of 2000–2001 was caused by, among other things, hype and unrealistic expectations. (Didn’t mention how Gartner and its ilk, when they aren’t driving pervasive integration basically invented hype and unrealistic expectations). One of her final slides was an illustration of a series of columns, each labeled things like “health care”, “human resources”, “security”, and so on. and her point being that we shouldn’t expect to deal with government customers simply within their “silos”…but that we should attempt to sell solutions across clusters of activity… or something like that; that silos were obsolete. At which my neighbor said, in his best flat New England accent, “well, we still got a few of them silos on the farm in Vermont..”.