I love it when Hoff uses big words, but he is wrong about evolution

So my friend Chris Hoff, I guess back from Africa (wasn't that a movie? No it was Back to Africa, I think) takes exception to my post on the inherent flexibility of people as opposed to appliances.  I love it when Chris uses big words, and he does not disappoint here, throwing out orthogonal (meaning at a right angle), to describe my argument to the original topic. 

Of course what Chris really takes exception to most in my post is that I talk about most appliances being actually just COTS hardware with a fancy bezel on them.  He throws some dirt around the other stuff, which I will dig into in a minute. However, Chris wants to make sure that everyone knows that at least for the enterprise, the way to go is big honking appliances, as sold by his favorite company.  Hey Chris, easy big fella, I recognize that the Crossbeam X-series is not just some Dell Server with a fancy bezel.  I also applaud the fact that you can run multiple apps on there without it turning into a "ghetto" as Robert Mitchell at ComputerWorld wrote about today.  However, there are too many damn appliances out there and people are paying a premium for them when for the most part they don't have to.  But I think you actually understand and agree with that.  So lets get into the people thing then.

Chris, not sure of what your experience has been but I think you can easily move somebody from patching to IDS monitoring and work him up to administrating firewall rules.  Hell, send him to SANS or something.  But you can't do that with an appliance. For the most part, you throw them out and start over.  How many people have you worked with who have grown into bigger and better roles?  I see it happen all the time.  People learn, grow and adapt, single task appliances don't and you can't re-purpose them. 

On the issue of evolution and extinction, Chris you are right, the platypus is one funny looking monotreme (you see I can throw a big word in once in a while too. BTW monotreme's are mammals that lay eggs).  However, species who become too specialized are the ones susceptible to extinction events.  The ones who survive are the generalists who have the ability to adapt to multiple factors and thrive.  Just like IT people who can do more than one job.  Hell, I would bet under Darwin's law that even a Chief Strategy Officer like you or I can be taught to do something of higher value, like customer service rep or something ;-)   Welcome home Chris!

Editors note: The book image is from amazon and is by Jonathon Wells.  You can get it here