Dr. Dobb's Journal May 2006
Acknowledging milestones is a sure sign that an industry is, well, maturing. Let's see, this year marks the:
But another waypost worth noting has gone largely unnoticed—the 30th anniversary of Bill Gates's "Open Letter to Hobbyists," in which Gates became the first programmer to address the problem of software piracy. In his letter, published in the Homebrew Computer Club Newsletter (http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/V2_01/gatesletter.html), Gates noted that while he and Paul Allen had invested more than $40,000 of computer time to develop their version of BASIC, fewer than 10 percent of the people who had copies of it actually paid.
The immediate effect of the letter was to make a whole bunch of people mad. That happens when you call your friends a pack of "thieves." Not that it did much good in the long run. According to the Business Software Alliance (funded in part by Microsoft), software piracy cost the worldwide software industry $13 billion in lost revenue in 2002 (http://www.bsa.org/resources/upload/Software-Piracy-Fact-Sheet.pdf). In the U.S. alone, the industry lost nearly $2 billion, and more than 105,000 jobs, more than $5.3 billion in lost wages, and more than $1.4 billion in lost tax revenue.
And in a classic case of "be careful what you ask for," Gates said in his missive that "nothing would please [him] more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the...market with good software." At last count, Microsoft has more than 63,000 employees worldwide, not to mention umpteen contractors. Granted, most of these people aren't programmers, but this is still a classic example of how you move from the fun of writing software to the work of selling it.
But software piracy isn't the only challenge the U.S. economy faces. According to Health Affairs (http://www.healthaffairs.org/), that honor goes to the healthcare industry. In a recent study (reported on by David Broder), it turns out that 16 percent of the gross domestic product goes to healthcare, a figure that might climb to 20 percent by 2015.
To control these out-of-control costs, the U.S. government is less interested in lowering the price of aspirin and more interested in investing in information technology. For instance, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is developing standardized systems for things such as remote monitoring and reporting of blood-sugar (and other) tests. Another goal of the department is to develop systems for exchanging standardized test information and results among medical offices. Finally, the department is building pattern-matching systems to track reported illnesses, with an eye towards early detection of pandemics.
In other issues near-and-dear to information technology and the U.S. economy, the ACM has released a study entitled "Globalization and Offshoring of Software," which examines current globalization trends in the software industry (http://www.acm.org/globalizationreport/).
The study, which examined a dozen firms and cited data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor (BLS), claims that, even with increases in offshoring, there were more IT jobs available in the U.S. in 2004 than at the height of the dotcom era. More specifically, U.S. IT employment in 2004 was 17 percent higher than in 1999, concluding that, based on government data, IT jobs will be among the fastest-growing occupations over the next decade.
Good news, right? Well maybe—and maybe not. As Norm Matloff points out (http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/ASMStudy.txt), the study included job categories that are not suitable for computer science graduates—computer support jobs, for instance. Moreover, the study included job categories for 2004 that didn't even exist in BLS data in earlier years. In what Matloff calls a "statistical sleight-of-hand," the study chose 1999 as its base, even though the numbers peaked during 2000-2001, with figures about 30 percent higher than 1999.
Matloff notes that the study doesn't necessarily identify "who" exactly is holding the jobs. In all likelihood, Matloff implies, it seems most of these new jobs are populated by H-1B or L-1 visa holders. Finally, says Matloff, the study concedes that firms are using H-1Bs and L-1s to facilitate offshoring.
— Jon Erickson