Three most important factors in enterprise IT: control, control, control

Opinion When the first generation of microcomputers landed on desktops, they promised many things. Affordability, flexibility, efficiency, all the good things still selling IT to this day. Mostly, though, they offered control.

PCs moved data processing from the local office and bureau to the person who most needed to control it. Since then, that control has been slowly clawed back until we’ve almost regressed to the pre-PC mainframe world. The promise of control has been broken.

There are three ways this is hurting hard enough to threaten America’s imperial dominance over enterprise IT, only two of which can be blamed on AI. The other is more immediate, more political and potentially more permanent, and it came home to roost recently as lead pigeon of what may be a sky-darkening flock.

The immediate news was that the International Criminal Court was banging the gavel on Microsoft’s productivity software ...