Universities Lost the Internet

It still bothers me that my Slack domain is https://workplace.slack.com instead of https://slack.workplace.com. The enplatformification of the internet has affected the corporates as well as universities.

When I first came to Ithaca in 1993, Cornell’s Central IT (CIT) had developed a suite for online services such as email and gopher called “Bear Access” the the more technically oriented people called “Bear With Me Access”. They also created early video chat software

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CU-SeeMe

By the mid 2000s they had backed away from client software but were still contributing to an effort to build a web-based accounting package for higher ed. They were badly disorganized at the time, going through channels worked about 50% of the time, otherwise you had to use “vendor management” tactics verging on “social engineering” to get things done. (For instance I had a problem w/ the backup system and put in a ticket… Two days later I found out who was in charge of backup and he told me their ticket system had been down for more than two weeks)

Today they are scarily competent at managing managed Windows machines but the only dev team that I know about there today is identity management.

When all those creative, skilled IT people found they could make double the money moving out of higher ed into start-ups and industry at the same time that the administrations realized that crazy IT stuff was actually mission-critical and that they needed to use what cash they had to double-down on reliable rather than creative the die was cast.

"A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for"

The author's experience aligns with my own, both at university and working with government-funded scientific and engineering organizations. I suspect that many well-intentioned cybersecurity, outsourcing, and streamlining measures have, on the whole, significantly harmed the ability of these organizations to fulfill their missions.

Its sad, but i think its a natural consequence of the internet growing up.

You could do whatever you wanted when nobody cared about the internet. Now that its business critical, all the burocracy has come home to roost.

Merely shifted from DARPA to NSA.

See also: Microsoft buying Skype and disabling the P2P features so all calls get routed through NSA-enabled servers for PRISM. (Side note but this also made calls objectively worse.)

Cats won the internet.