Good-bye ATM. Farewell ColdFusion. Adios COBOL.
The global IT training company Global Knowledge recently culled through a number of hiring and pay reports to compile a list of 10 once-hot IT skills that are now . . . going, going, gone.
“There are some things in life, like good manners, which never go out of style, and there are other things, like clothing styles that fall in and out of fashion, but when an IT skill falls out of favor, it rarely ever comes back,” the firm stated in its recent white paper entitled Ten Dying IT Skills.
The Number One dying skill is Asynchronous Transfer Mode, calling ATM “a technology increasingly challenged by speed and traffic shaping requirements of converged voice and data networks.”
The next near-death skill is Novell Net Ware. “Novell’s network operating system was the de facto standard for LANs in the 1990s,” the report states. “But Novell failed to compete with the marketing might of Microsoft.”
Ranked third is Visual J++ due to the programming debacle when Microsoft failed to implement Java-based features Sun Microsystems had requested and Microsoft eventually implemented Microsoft.Net. Next on the list are Wireless Application Protocol and ColdFusion.
Bells also toll for RAD/Extreme Programming, Siebel, SNA, HTML — due to easier to use WYSIYG HTML editors — and for COBOL.
“IBM cites statistics that 70 percent of the world’s business data is still being processed by COBOL applications,” according to the report. “But how many of these applications will remain in COBOL for the long term?”