A Brief History of the Pick Environment in Australia

Abstract

Mainstream Information Technology professionals have misunderstood the Pick environment for many years. The Pick environment has been conceived, designed and built with business solutions as its key driver. At its heyday there were over 3,000 business applications available across a very wide range of hardware platforms supporting from 1 to thousands of real time users. The tentative economic recovery of the 90s and the Y2K fears created cautious and conservative corporate decision-making. During those tumultuous years there were startling leaps in information and communications technology rewarding those who invested in the future and in themselves. The Pick community at the time were fragmented and somewhat narrow-minded in their view of the future and were unable to collectively invest in developing new technologies. Corporate executive peer group pressure to adopt 'vanilla' relational technologies and the desire for homogeneity is creating even more pressure on the Pick community