Tom Sullivan

Users should choose and manage their own PCs.

At first blush, that's a radical notion any right-thinking CTO would dismiss out of hand. But not so fast: IT shouldn't dictate what computers and handhelds users get -- and perhaps IT shouldn't manage them, either. That's the conclusion some IT organizations are reaching, or at least investigating.

Google has both refreshed and open sourced its Google Update software, which is code-named Omaha. By making the software available under the open source Apache license, developers working on an auto-updater can use Google's code, which also enables Google to publish updates and plug security holes.

"Omaha allows us to add features seamlessly and address any bugs or security problems, all without concern that these updates will disrupt our users," wrote Myles Jordan of Google's software engineering team in a blog post on Friday. "Omaha allowed us to ship 12 versions of Chrome beta in 4 months, without requiring Chrome users to work hard to keep their browsers up to date. Such behavior is very useful for new features, but essential for security vulnerabilities."

Illustration: Lou BeachUntil this week, the major analyst houses have said the current recession is not as bad as what the tech sector suffered though in 2001 and 2002 after the dotcom bubble popped. Forrester, IDC, and Gartner still all agree that IT spending is down, but whether this recession is worse than the dotcom fallout is now a matter of debate.

The fact that analysts were maintaining that IT is not in as much trouble today as it was during the last recession has served as something of a beacon of hope for tech workers.

Information Technology shops are turning to the cloud even faster than expected, at least according to Gartner, and other firms had already predicted hearty adoption throughout the next few years.

Gartner last week released a report estimating that worldwide cloud services revenue will not only surpass US$56.3 billion this year but, perhaps more telling, will surge to just more than $150 billion in 2013.

Microsoft's Vista operating system is currently running on fewer than 20 percent of desktops, but the company's browser market share is up and Google's recent entrant into the browser fray, Chrome, is not gaining much attraction.

That's according to Janco and the IT Productivity Center's March 2009 Browser and Operating System Market Share White Paper.

IBM last week announced that it has become the first company to earn more than 4,000 patents in a single year, and also said it will ratchet up the number of technical innovations it publishes instead of seeking patent protection.

This is the 16th straight year that Big Blue led the race, pulling in 4,186 patents throughout 2008. Samsung ranked second with 3,515 patents, Canon third at 2,114, while Microsoft was fourth with 2,030, and Intel took the fifth spot with 1,776. Hewlett-Packard, meanwhile, came in at number 10 with 1,424.

Google on Wednesday detailed a new program under which resellers can now offer Google Apps to businesses -- effectively meaning that companies considering the alternative to Microsoft Office don't have to go it alone. But the search giant has yet to prove its strength in supporting a partner ecosystem that could bring enterprises much needed assurances.

"This is a natural evolution of where Google Apps is," says Stephen Cho, director of Google Apps channels. In the two years since Google launched its productivity applications, Cho continues, Google has made progress with enterprise features and SLAs and gotten more than 1 million businesses aboard.

With support for three of the major pillars of application development and deployment -- Oracle 11g, Microsoft SQL, and open source MySQL -- under its belt, Amazon.com appears to be anticipating a major move by the enterprise into the cloud.

Plus, Amazon.com provisions Microsoft Windows Server, Oracle Fusion middleware, three Oracle backup and data recovery tools, and the open source LAMP stack.

A career as a Cobol programmer might not be as sexy as slinging Java code or scripting in Ruby, but if you buckle down and learn hoary old Cobol, you could land one of the safest, most secure jobs in IT.

Analyst reports indicate that Cobol salaries are on the upswing. The language is easy to learn, there's a healthy demand for the skills, and offshore Cobol programmers are in short supply -- plus, the language itself holds the promise of longevity. All that loose talk about mainframes going away has subsided, and companies committed to big iron need Cobol pros to give them love.

Every time the economy turns downward, IT shops take a hit.

In the U.S. IT market, Forrester Research predicts that growth in technology goods and services will slow in the fourth quarter of this year, a scenario likely to continue into the first half of 2009. Gartner, meanwhile, is advising clients to hedge, rather than presuming the economy will pick up next year.

Facing uncertain economic times, enterprises may be more likely to turn to cloud computing services -- such as SaaS (software as a service), Amazon-style utility computing, and managed service providers -- for the lower up-front costs, the faster time to market, and the ability to add capabilities quickly without investing in new hardware.

Analysts at Gartner and TABB Group, a research and advisory firm that focuses on financial markets, agree that the current economic downturn is already sparking interest in cloud computing both on Wall Street and elsewhere. "We expect examinations of various cloud services to accelerate," says Gartner fellow and vice president Ken McGee. "There will be a flight toward looking for lower-cost options."

It's a classic case of mine vs. yours: Users are downloading a crop of new and often unsanctioned programs onto their PCs, bypassing IT's careful management discipline. Although user-downloaded apps are nothing new, they're now streaming onto business PCs at a fever pitch -- bolstered by the automatic updating common to many apps and by the trend of apps self-installing when needed by a browser. These have joined the familiar parade of personal apps users just can't seem to live without at work, such as instant messaging and even iTunes.

IT has struggled to deal with user-installed apps for years, but the new, constant flood of these programs may simply be too much to handle. Perhaps IT has to admit defeat and abandon efforts to control what users install on their PCs -- accepting the IT heresy that users' PCs are in fact their PCs, not IT's machines.