Regulated Back to the Stone Age

Leadership is something that is never in large supply. To be a leader, you have to see things that others don't see; so, almost by definition, there just aren't a lot of leaders around at any given moment.

That's too bad, because what we really need right now in IT is people who can take the green football and run with it. It's really getting down to the time where it's no more business as usual; things are changing, and if you don't change, well, someone else will make you change. And that someone else is going to be the government. In a report commissioned by the UK Government and headed by ex-Chief Economist of the World Bank Nicholas Stern, it was estimated that approximately 20 percent of all economic activity is going to vanish due to man made global warming. Politicans, for all the evil they might do, just aren't going to let that happen; they are going to prevent it by doing what they do best, which is regulate the tarnish out the industries that are causing the problem. And that industry, front and center, is IT.

WEEE and RoHS are just the beginning on this one. Politicans are going to look at numbers like these, where 30 percent of the UK power is going towards running ofice equipment and they are going to act, and not in a slow way. In like a punitive way, a way that lets them tax the tarnish out of business and lets the money flow into public coffers. And I promise you, they don't take prisoners, don't care if you go bankrupt or not.