MicrosoftEric Pellegrini- almost all of my users use some sort of hybrid of cloud and local resources. One of the very EASY answers for why they don't use all cloud is that internet access here in the bodunk town of Rochester NY is incredibly expensive for businesses. And FAST internet access is astronomical. I was paying over $400 a month for 20/20 fiber. That's 20mb/s. You can't run most businesses over that and for a small business that's a LOT of money. I have another paying $1500 a month for 20/20 fiber plus a WAN to link all their remote locations. They ALL share that 20/20 - otherwise they'd be buying multiple multi thousand dollar routers and the AMP licenses that go with them. There are some EXTREMELY PRACTICAL reasons why the cloud is not suitable for everyone. And I have been in this industry since 1978. So far there is no single advancement that means that clients don't need help implementing IT. I certainly service MORE clients with the SAME resources. But most clients can't even spell Ethernet correctly or understand what an IP is. And they shouldn't have to.
Even if they have office365 that doesn't mean they use it. One of my multinational clients has it. I surveyed with personal interviews almost 100 users out of 800 users. Most used only outlook. About 20 percent used oneDrive. About 5 percent used sharepoint libraries the way they were intended to be. They had a giant sharepoint mess on their hands because lots of people started sharepoint sites then abandoned them, or developed them when their company was independent and then got folded into the larger company or whatever. We identified hundreds if not thousands of hours of training, organizing, evangelizing, restricting and permitting users that needed to be done to improve collaboration in their organization. Just because a tool is there doesn't mean users know about it, use it, or understand the advantages of it. And especially now with tools having little to no documentation a user who requires handholding is going to get left behind quickly. UI isn't intuitive to everyone and things like broken rulers make it less intuitive.
I have entirely zero worry that in the next 10-15 years of my career I will become irrelevant. Or that after that I'll stop keeping up with what technology is doing. Because that's just not reality. In reality the need for people that can understand, interpret, integrate, provide, train and consult on applying technology to business will pretty much always be needed. Or at least for the foreseeable future of my career before I retire. You see I've been through this before. Many times. When PCs first came out. When networks started to become a thing. When hard drives were available to consumers. When disks came out. When CompuServe and Forums and BBSes and modem based services were invented. When the email was created. When the internet became a thing. When websites were invented. When programming went from procedural to object oriented to entirely other forms. When virtual servers started being common. When online service became a thing. When Microsoft replaced Novell. When Apple Macs and Iphones blew up in importance. When social media hit the airwaves. When I could hold more computing power in my hand held phone than my entire campus had when I learned to program. You see adapting to change and making it work for people has been my life-long goal, and my life-long success. I've been running tech companies for 25 years and working in them for 40. So your assumption that I'm worried about my irrelevance or the irrelevance of the services or products we provide is pretty laughable.
You obviously don't support end users in the real world much or you'd understand this. You must not configure their networks, help them buy ISP services, install their hardware, put the software on them that makes it run, train them how to use it, service their systems and update them, repair them when they fail, provision them on the cloud, create their user accounts, support their endpoints, protect them from malware. Perhaps that is why products become disconnected from their user base. Perhaps you should try these things more so that you understand what users actually need and want.
There - rant done.
