Foreword

Everyone has an opinion about the ratings in this book, and about its conclusions. What follows is simply how I see it, and I welcome feedback and suggestions, offered honestly. My view will not always match someone else’s, and that is a good thing: we are different people, and disagreeing with each other is a natural part of that.

I have done my best to put my own experience into words, and here and there I take a turn that will not fully align with everyone’s. I have also tried to keep everything in this book current, but nothing moves as fast as the world of EUC, which is exactly what makes it, to me, the most interesting corner of the IT landscape.

There are two worlds in which the consumers of products and services are called users. One of them is IT.

It is a word we rarely stop to think about in this industry, precisely because we use it so often. User management. User experience. End user. It is functional, neutral, almost administrative: a label for whoever stands at the far end of the infrastructure, the policy, and the architecture. But it is also, if you pause on it for a moment, a strange word to describe a person by. Nobody calls themselves a user. People call themselves accountants, nurses, mechanics, parents. Only the moment they open a laptop do they suddenly become, in our systems, our reports, and our scorecards, “the user.”

This book, underneath every technology it discusses, keeps returning to the same question: are we building IT for that user, or merely over them? The term End User Computing carries the answer in its own name. The end user is not there by accident.

Throughout this book, 2014 comes up again and again. That year is not an arbitrary reference point. In my view, 2014 marks the tipping point at which organizations began to take the cloud seriously: no longer as an experiment on the sidelines, but as a genuine alternative to the server closet down the hall. It was the year Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft, with “mobile first, cloud first” as the explicit driving force behind the company’s direction, well before Azure had the scale it has today. That same year, Google set in motion a different, equally consequential shift: the open-source release of Kubernetes, shortly after the rise of Docker, built on years of experience running its own Borg platform. Two tracks that would eventually converge: one focused on how organizations came to consume cloud services, the other on how vendors themselves came to build them, but both driven by the same underlying promise of scale and flexibility that this book returns to, chapter after chapter.