The U.S. economy has weathered 18 recessions spanning a total of 90 years since 1776, not including the current downturn. Each of those 18 prior recessions, some with descriptive names like "The Long Depression," which lasted a whopping 23 years from 1873 to 1896, had one thing in common. More on CIO.com Defying the Recession with Private Label Best Practices Will Technology Fuel a Recession Comeback?
They ended. And so will this one.
When Vint Cerf, the father of the Internet speaks out on a topic, you should listen. Cerf has recently expressed concern about "bit rot." What's that? Wikipedia describes bit rot as a "computing term used either to describe gradual decay of storage media or to facetiously describe the spontaneous degradation of a software program over time."
In an industry so accustomed to looking forward to the "new new thing" (to borrow from writer Michael Lewis), bit rot could bring your company's operations to a grinding halt. Every reader of this column has bit rot festering in their infrastructure. Some prime examples are millions of lines of legacy code that have operated smoothly for decades and then one day just don't work. Often this happens because obscure, latent code embedded deep within a strategically important legacy application doesn't play nice with new software you are installing.
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