For many more years than I would like to admit, I have been a technology market analyst.  I never covered the commodity products (PC, phones, printers) but that more complex infrastructural issues (mainframes, storage, middleware).

My problem with this right now is that I feel I belong in a parallel universe to my industry colleagues.  Social, collaborative and mobile business has driven all of them into the world of SXSW, Uber, WhatsApp, etc.  But the next hot thing, whatever it is,  is still about customer experience and retention.  And guess what?  Cannot do that without the decent infrastructure.   But plumbing only appears sexy to other plumbers, and even those plumbers are having less and less knowledge about what is under the hood. You cannot run an app if the infrastructure to do so isn’t working properly, or protecting your data and privacy, or giving you a decent signal strength.  Less and less people seem to care about infrastructure and outsource it, which can also be seen on national highways, domestic roads and other utilities.  Cheap and not so cheerful?  I want to make the fundamentals better, and I appear to be in limited company with the quest.  Sigh.