> The insanity goes both ways: I refuse to use a cellphone, so I will not buy a car that has Android or Apple stuff.
I think you are firmly in the minority here and probably not the market they are building for. I bet much less than 1% of people who will buy a car in the next year refuse to use a cell phone.
Until someone breaks into a company via a personal mobile device and steals a whole bunch of data, and now companies are liable for security faults on mobile devices they don't have any control over. Oh, wait ...
Anytime someone asks me to use their personal whatever to do "work" my reply is twofold: "Okay, 1) the company now gets to scan and archive everything on your personal device--please do make sure that there are no naked pictures, including those of you, your partner or your children taking baths, etc. or we will have to fire you and likely report you to the police and 2) the service you are requesting will be promoted to a public facing service and will be available outside the firewall with our standard security features--I will take that up with the CxO levels."
1) generally stops people cold and it should.
Generally you get "You can DO that?" followed by an "Ummmmmmmmm..." as they think about what is on their phone. I don't want to scan your personal device. I don't want to know what you do, really. Please, spare me. I was an email admin in the early days of the Internet; I didn't want to see it then, and I certainly don't want to see it now.
2) this causes an actual discussion about need and risk.
This is going to be outside and is a security hazard; how much risk is really involved? Do we really need this service available to multiple people, or is this a one-off request? I'm not even averse to a one-off, but I'll keep an eye on it (I always have sunset deadlines for outside services if I can). If, after say 6 months, it's still just one person using it, it's probably going to get shut back down.
I understand that firewalls aren't magic. I try to harden things inside the firewall to the same levels as outside. However, work needs to get done, people take shortcuts, etc. "Secure" is not absolute--my goal is to try to align the risks with the benefits while only being about 1/2 an asshole about it.
Personally I also like the one about installing software on any personal device that is used to access company systems so any company sysadmin can instantly remote wipe it at their own discretion if they decide security is at risk.
It turns out that some people didn't realise that the above story was supposed to be satirical and actually built tools that will do that. Whatever you do, don't ask those people about stats on things like legitimate vs. accidental, malicious or negligent wipes. Certainly don't ask about the proportion of employees who were subject to "bad" wipes but got no apology or compensation, just an HR or legal goon pointing to an agreement they signed but did not even slightly understand in which they explicitly consented to exactly that.
If a business has a genuine need for someone to have mobile access to its systems -- which is sometimes reasonable, though not nearly as often as a certain kind of manager pretends -- then the business should provide a completely independent device under its own control for that purpose. It's really that simple.
> the business should provide a completely independent device under its own control for that purpose. It's really that simple.
I agree. We provide laptops and phones. However, you would not believe the bitching about "Now I have to carry another phone and computer."
And, whenever we wind up with a better laptop on hand, we do a surprise "upgrade" to somebody unannounced. We take the old one and hand them a new blank one with no access to the old one to simulate a hard drive crash.
If they aren't back up and running in 4 hours, we take the new laptop back, blank it, give them their old laptop back and give the new one to somebody else.
The fact that they aren't going to get a new shiny computer unless their computer is recoverable focuses their attention quite well.
Did you need to rescue the systems because Java couldn't do the job? Or because it had 500 different(many poor) developers in the code? My guess is the latter...but I don't know your projects.
We use a local repo as well(its easy to setup) and so this type of security is not something we even think about. If we are adding/version changing dependencies we just have to put a little more work into making sure the jar that goes to our local repo is good, but that doesn't happen every day. Of course when prototyping or just playing around this could become an issue...
Most older, local, small businesses in small to medium markets in the US will never be growth businesses. They're treading water businesses after the market is saturated (some can be very profitable of course).
Being technical about it, a business may keep up with inflation by raising prices, and show nominal growth.
Look at the revenue of a liquor store, insurance business, or tv / radio station, in a healthy but smaller settled market. No market growth, little to no business growth, but the businesses aren't likely to disappear either. This is a very common scenario, there are millions of US businesses in this situation.
More accurately: they're earning normal economic profits. This assumes that economic activity is normally profitable, which isn't unreasonable in certain circumstances, though it's not guaranteed.
Driver of what? Maybe a dry-cleaner or cafe is happy with the size they are, because expanding would involve turning the business into a chain or something else the owner doesn't want.
Not that economic orthodoxy is a good measure of reality, but there is a theory of the optimum size of a firm that will determine its size.
There are natural monopolies which grow without apparent limit, or rather, whose growth is constrained only by the total size of the market, rather than some lower bound. For these, there's always the capability of adding additional profitable production.
For other businesses, there are natural constraints on scale: a regional market or operation which can only sustain so much business, high scale-related costs, etc.
As two canonical examples, telecommunications scales quite well with scale, and in the history of telecoms we find a long history of monopolies: Western Union in the telegraph age, AT&T in the telephony age, and now Comcast in the broadband era. Once you've got cables strung, your primary limitation is last-mile wiring. But it's the long-distance and total bandwidth capacities which give you maximum value.
Concrete is a counterexample: there's a limited local market (whatever local building activity will support), and your transport costs are very high: concrete is heavy stuff. Concrete tends to be a pretty localized industry, though it might be possible for a single firm to develop out of what are essentially multiple regional markets.
Growth, where possible, profitable, and sustainable for a business, is often pursued, but it's not a necessary condition for success.
An instant counterexample I thought of is a non-profit.
Individuals working there are always excited about personal empire building of course, but if the stated community need is being met, well, that's good enough, in fact if that need is dropping that can sometimes be awesome.
Stereotypical orphanage or red cross or homeless shelter.
Churches are another business that often is fairly steady state plus or minus population changes and inflation.
Of course non profits can experience explosive growth, my credit union is a non-profit coop and since the nationwide banks have gone into decline with exploding fees and imploding services, the CU has recently had exploding growth rates. Which admittedly has a lot more to do with external societal factors than internal goals.
