What a CEO wants, and what "those in the know" want, are often poles apart.

Talk to any telecommunications company today and they will swear black and blue that VoIP is the only way forward. "Convergence, convergence, convergence," they will shout. And yes, it's a great idea.. I guess.

Talk to anyone that's worked with telephony for any length of time, however, and all of a sudden squashing a real-time protocol into a data network becomes problematic. And what CEO wants to hear about such things as QoS, jitter, statistical multiplexing? CEOs rate themselves if they understand that VoIP will introduce a bit of delay, thinking that their last phone call to Germany wasn't so bad over the PSTN.

What does that have to do with programming? Well, Perl programmers (in my opinion, and my opinion only) tend to understand pragmatism, which involves looking at the world realistically.. and Perl programmers will often be the first to admit when their language doesn't solve a particular problem (although Perl does solve a lot of problems).

Hence it all comes down to who gets into management. Who wins the next board meeting political show down. Trying to predict this is about as accurate as picking whether Nortel shares will go up or down next month.

We're living in an ever changing world, and two things don't change: politics and ever changing feedback loops.. the world is not a time-invariant linear system.. *sigh*