“At Google, we seek that advantage. The ongoing debate about whether big corporations are mismanaging knowledge workers is one we take very seriously, because those who don’t get it right will be gone. We’ve drawn on good ideas we’ve seen elsewhere and come up with a few of our own.”
— Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) and Hal Varian DDD

You know that you have made it in this world when your name becomes synonymous with what you do. People no longer search the net for information — they “google” for it. Within less than a decade, the search engine has evolved from a small Internet startup to a publicly traded company that quite a few people consider “the new Microsoft.”

The reader might wonder what this has to do with ITS. After all, Google is nothing but a search engine — a great engine, admittedly, but nothing more. There is nothing they could do that influences the way public transportation works. Or is there?

The Ghost of Christmas Past

Like in Dickens, we’ll move back a little in time to see how IT industry changes have been reflected in our business. When INIT was founded in 1983, computers were not as ubiquitous as they are now. MS-DOS was only two years old, and the Intel 8086 had a 640K memory limitation. The very first version of Windows was about to be released, but there was no comparison to what that software is like today.

In order to provide transit authorities with the very first CAD/AVL systems, vendors could not rely on this young PC technology. They needed more power and stability, so they preferred server-based solutions, such as powerful Unix- or VMS-machines. The end user did not have his or her own computer, but a so-called “terminal” that would allow him access to the hosted application.

If you look at modern installations, you will no longer find any trace of this old mainframe technology. As Microsoft and Intel started taking over the computer market, the old servers were replaced by modern Windows-based machines. What drove ITS vendors to do so? Was the new technology more reliable or powerful? Not for a long time — it took several versions and updates of the operating system and a significant reengineering effort to get the modern AVL generations to the same level (and beyond) of what the originals already had a long time ago.

So why did the vendors do it? Because there was a market demand. Customers wanted to be able to work with standard hardware that was inexpensive and did not require special knowledge to maintain (at least not beyond what a normal system administrator already knows). They wanted to be able to run other programs like word processors or spreadsheets on the same machines. In other words, they wanted their technology to be “standard.”