CTO Blog

Feb 11th, 2038

Reporter: Your global news network software agent

Not without a little fondness, and after a long and gallant struggle, the IT Industry Version 1.0 passed away in the night at 02:00 GMT, Feb 11th 2038, when the final operational IT product sold by licence was decommissioned. The decommissioning was a low-key affair, although it was witnessed by a small selection of luminaries from the academic world.

Some say the spirit of the IT product-based economy lives on – with some out of maintenance products still in use on patched-up, half working personal computers maintained by remote communities disconnected from the Internet - but the considered view is that this is little more than urban myth.

30 years to this day, on February 11th 2008, two critical, near-simultaneous events happened which confirmed the long predicted IT Industry shift from a product-based to a service-based economy.

First, Yahoo rejected the $40bn approach from Microsoft, starting a bidding war for Internet services companies and precipitating a transformation in many of the established product companies.

Second, Google demonstrated Android for the first time, an open source software platform for mobile phones – vastly increasing advertising revenue potential from people without personal computers but with mobile devices connected to the Internet.

Into the structured records of time’s database we two phase commit our friend – short lived, some say loved and loathed in equal measure, but which for sure made an impact in its day.