Hardware hangover

For corporations the world over, the tech bubble of the late 1990s was an orgy of excess, which, like all parties that go on too long and involve far too much consumption, ended in a brutal hangover. Information technology (IT) departments simply bought too many servers, storage devices, and PCs in preparation for Y2K, the introduction of the euro, and an e-commerce bonanza that, like an absinthe-induced hallucination, seemed very real at the time, but vanished following the dot-com crash. Overall, the IT market is maturing its way to sustainable, albeit unspectacular, growth. The paper considers how system complexity is driving customers and vendors to seek solace and solutions in software.