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Opinion
GAFYD: What’s A Developer to Do?
8/30/2006
Is there no work left for IT developers on campus to do in this area? The implications for IT staffing and costs on campus are not clear, but it is clear that there will be implications. And there probably will be lots of adoption on campuses. Unlike hosted applications from vendors without much known history, who might be bought out or go under, many of us look at Google and see those billions of dollars and figure it’s going to be around for a while. And a bonus with Google is that pages hosted on Google are likely to be indexed in Google a little bit faster.
The same concerns about relying on a single large vendor (Blackboard redux) apply, of course, but it appears from conversations I have had with administrators on several campuses that they’re more comfortable with Google than with Blackboard. Especially given Blackboard’s new patents which many feel have overstepped appropriate boundaries.
I can’t help feel a bit giddy – like we’ve taken one step too many and we’re starting to slide down the glacier at speed: More new things coming soon, and faster. Even as a user, how will I find time to keep up? Sigh. Maybe more of our IT staff will become facilitators or trainers.
Seriously, folks, think of us as users: How can we keep on doing our jobs and still find the time to learn all of these new things? And we still have the threat of Windows Vista hanging over our heads as a future learning curve. Ah, well. Things are definitely not boring.
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