Comments on: Don Fowler lecture and TWIT

I found Don Fowler's lecture to be very interesting. While I had heard of the job title "IT consultant" before, I was always unaware of what that really meant. Mr. Fowler did a great job of showing us what it is IT consultants do--they are hired by a various clients to help make certain aspects of the businesses of their clients run more efficiently and effectively through the use of information technology. One thing I found interesting through Mr. Fowler's presentation was the fact that this is a job that has directly been created by the dawn of the age of computers. Without computer technology, this type of job could not exist, and none of the solutions IT consultants devise for their clients would be possible to employ. For example, Fowler's solution to the case study he used in class was to outsource his business to areas where labor is cheaper. Without computers, and especially without the internet, it would not be possible to spread out different aspects of a business over different continents, because communication and transfer of information between each of the beacons in different geographical areas would be impossible.

I also found it very interesting that, as Mr. Fowler noted, the IT Consulting industry has business in times of economic boom and economic recession. In an economic boom, businesses look to IT consultants to help them expand their business. In times of recession, businesses look to IT consultants to help them make their businesses more cost effective. In this way, the job of an IT consultant is stable because he still has a lot of work in times of economic turmoil. On the other hand, because an IT consultant works from project to project, he doesn't have a steady employment. Instead of constantly being assigned tasks by a boss, an IT consultant has to advertise to different businesses to pick him to do their consults rather than another IT consultant. In this way, an IT consultant could find himself in work one second, and completely out of work in the next. There is no in between.

I thought the topic in This Week In Tech about how technology is changing the world of newspaper publishing very interesting. This Week In Tech says that as more people gain the ability to access the internet, they are using the internet to receive there news online, both because it is faster to find what you want to read and because it is (in many cases) free. I agree that the rise of the Internet will continue to lead to the downfall of print news sources. For one, as older people who don't know much about the Internet die and tech-savvy youngsters take their place, less and less people will look to print sources to get their news. Also, with the rise of blogs and sites like Wikipedia, people are working for free to publish news on every topic imaginable. How can an industry that has to pay its writers to write news topics every keep up? What makes this worse, as TWIT notes, is that online advertisements make much less money per advertisement than do print advertisements. This means that even if these news sources do make the transition from print to the Internet, they won't get as much revenue from advertisements, yet there writers will still want the same salary. On top of that, these websites won't be able to charge the user a fee to read the online newspaper because there are tons of sources of news on the internet that are completely free, and users will just use these if a site requires them to pay. Lastly, many people, myself included, just don't like the organization of a print newspaper. You have to turn and fold countless pages to read the story you want, and then do it again when you turn to another page to read the second half of the article. This doesn't happen with internet news sources. There's nothing to physically handle or sort through, you just click on an article and read it. for these reasons, people are switching from reading the hard-to-read newspapers to reading online sources of news.