The opening up of new markets and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as US Steel illustrate the process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one … [The process] must be seen in its role in the perennial gale of creative destruction; it cannot be understood on the hypothesis that there is a perennial lull.

—Joseph Schumpeter, The Process of Creative Destruction, 1942

The process of creative destruction is an important one. A classic example is the death of the Polaroid Instamatic film camera once digital cameras became popular. The increasing marketplace irrelevance of IBM when Microsoft released Windows, and the turning of the tide against Microsoft towards Google. The lesson to be learned, on every level – expand your talents and skills, as one day you have to stop doing things the way you currently do them. If you don’t, you will wake up one morning in the near future, and realize that you are obsolete.

Moreso than other industries, this is true in IT. Things are still moving fast enough that the market is very different every few months. If you fall asleep at the wheel, and do the thing you’ve been doing for 5 years, you’ll wake up to find someone else is doing it faster, cheaper and much much better. The best large scale example of this that comes to mind is email. For years, companies, universities and governments have been buying and maintaining their own email systems. Nobody really thought about the economies of scale – even those who were in the market providing webmail (Hotmail comes to mind). They never figured out the two most important features of email – users need more space and interfaces suck. Before Google arrived on the scene the average webmail provider handed out between 5 and 50 MB of disk space per mailbox. Universities offered between 5 and 500 MB, usually tending towards the lower numbers. Usability was a nightmare – left to the desktop client for most things, and the painful webmail interfaces otherwise.

Google changed all of that. When they launched GMail, they announced that everyone would have a gig of storage – and the world thought it was an April Fool’s joke due to unfortunate timing. They had keyboard shortcuts that made sense for email reading, and most importantly, the system felt like it was used by someone who really understood email. Today, 5 years later, GMail gives out 7.5GB of space without blinking an eye. It’s integrated into their jabber server (GTalk) and their web-based Office Suite (Google Docs). They have single sign-on between all their related services. What makes it even crazier is what they charge for it. If you are only getting 50 or 500 accounts, it’s around $60/user/year (including 10 years of legal-compliant archives). When you scale out to a University system, or the City of Los Angeles, the cost drops rapidly. The numbers I’ve heard are around $14/user/year.

Any mail server administrator that runs Exchange, GroupWise, or Lotus Notes needs to be paying attention. It’s getting to the point where if you support less than 4000 users, you are no longer cost effective. It will be cheaper to replace you, the servers you run, and your expensive benefits (401K, health insurance, etc) with the faceless and unsleeping Google Apps administration. Another member of the organization will spend a few weeks scripting the Active Directory environment to auto-provision email accounts from Google when new people show up (and, hopefully, disable accounts as people leave). The lowly mail server administrator’s career is going to be over in a few years.

Now is the time to learn other skills. Most good administrators aren’t good because they know one product very well. They are usually good because they know a whole range of products and skills very well. They look at the Google Apps as a welcome thing. Google is offering to take a tedious, boring and repetitive task off their hands, and free them up to work on the next fun project. Control freaks and lesser administrators fear Google, because it’s going to replace their only skill set. Schumpeter’s perennial gale of creative destruction is blowing.