Overview

The U.S. economy is perched precariously on top of some 200 billion lines of aging legacy mainframe code ^[1] and a comparable amount of newer, but no less endangered, code on various flavors of servers and PCs. This represents a $3 trillion investment, ^[2] most of which will need to be replaced over the next decade, at a price more likely to hit $10 trillion.

This is pretty much business a usual, except for two things:

• A large percentage of this cost, perhaps as much as half, is avoidable.

• The approach we take to this next round of replacement will determine how much of this investment really will be an "investment" that will carry forward to subsequent generations of technology.

And the technology on which the realization of these benefits hinges is not really a technology at all. It is a 2500-year-old branch of philosophy, made suddenly relevant by a confluence of developments: semantics.

Consider the following:

• The Mars Climate Observer crashed into the surface of Mars, a victim not of a technical problem, but of a semantic misunderstanding concerning the units of measure used to calculate the thrust.

• Between half and three quarters of the $300 billion spent annually on systems integration is spent resolving semantic issues.

• The entire Y2K adventure was two semantic problems piled on top of each other, the first being the simple problem of determining whether "01" meant "1901" or "2001," the second being that the stewards of many of the affected...