Welcome to Episode 212

At 212 degrees fahrenheit, water becomes steam. At 211 it’s hot. At 212 you can move a locomotive or make electricity. We are happy to bring you episode 212 of the Killing IT Podcast!

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Topics:

Topic 1: CISA update

If the US government is not going to be helping small businesses with security alerts, who will step in to provide this service? Is there anything we can do to get CISA to help, or will this be another function we simply defer to Europe to provide the leadership?

Doing nothing is not an option? What are you doing to stay tuned to security alerts for your clients?

Topic 2: Taxes for IT consultants. Maryland and Washington announce new taxes. Who's next?

Not to say we told you so, but …

Whether we like it or not, taxes are coming to online services and tech support. Maryland's tax appeared very quickly, and then narrowed down to only SMALL IT consultants.

Dave mentioned this in his Business of Tech podcast, and the National Society of IT Service Providers addressed this on their blog at https://nsitsp.org/those-who-do-not-organize-get-taxed-lessons-from-marylands-3-tech-tax/.

Now is a great time to decide where we as an industry stand on this.

Topic 3: Under what circumstances should we rely on generative AI?

There's a growing disillusionment with generative AI. There continue to be problems with hallucinations and outright falsehoods. And there are continuing examples of just plain laziness - without any meaningful accountability.

We discuss a really great, Boolean decision tree. See the graphic at https://guides.lib.usf.edu/c.php?g=1315087&p=9678779. That graphic also provides a very short, very straight-forward description of the answer.

Does it matter if the output is true, accurate, or helpful? Do you have the knowledge and ability to determine whether the output is accurate?

Feedback always welcome!

:-)

Topic 1: CISA Under the Microscope

CISA was called out in the Project 2025 document as a left-wing organization inside the government due to their warning about election interference. It is now subject to cuts and scrutiny. In the mass firings at DHS on February 14th, 130 employees at CISA were fired as they were “probationary” employees.

Many MSPs and MSSPs subscribe to CISA.gov alerts. It is unclear how this will be affected. Wherever you stand on politics or related topics, small business needs a good source of security alerts we can rely on.

What's your take?

Topic 2 (AI, of course): Was DeepSeek revolutionary or just the next obvious step in the evolution of AI?

From Geekwire:
Satya Nadella's response was, "Jevons paradox strikes again! . . . As AI gets more efficient and accessible, we will see its use skyrocket, turning it into a commodity we just can’t get enough of."

What do you think. Just another step in the evolution of AI? Or is there news here?

See:
- https://www.geekwire.com/2025/microsoft-ceo-says-ai-use-will-skyrocket-with-more-efficiency-amid-craze-over-deepseek/

- Wikipedia on Jevon’s Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

- ChatGPT now has 300 million users (https://backlinko.com/chatgpt-stats)
- Google Search has 1 billion regular users, and now includes Gemini results at the top of every search
- Microsoft CoPilot has about 30 million users (https://www.businessofapps.com/data/microsoft-copilot-statistics/)
- Adobe Creative Cloud has about 30 million users and includes AI in all products (https://photutorial.com/adobe-statistics/)

Topic 3: Will Microsoft compete with you - or your SOC?

Now available: Microsoft Defender Experts for XDR

Says Microsoft: "Our expertise is now your expertise. Augment your teams across security, compliance, identity, management, and privacy with Microsoft Security Experts."

See https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/business/services

Is this service worth considering, or should Microsoft put those resources into fixing security problems in their deployed software? The pages makes it sound like this will have a major human-led component, but that's exactly what they are NOT doing.

Will you jump on board or wait to see if this is real first? And will this help Microsoft cut payroll, or just require more hiring?

We welcome your feedback!

:-)

The Q4 2024 Killing IT Podcast features what may be our last discussion of robots for a long time!

Topic One - Where Are My Robots???

We’ve been talking about this for five years - So where are the robots? We have a massive personnel shortage on many fronts. AI is creating jobs faster and faster. So why haven’t robots evolved to serve us? We’re on the verge. What’s the holdup?

If nothing else, we're tired of talking about it.

Topic Two - The Changing Economy of Our Industry

In just the last five years, a layer of billion-dollar and near-billion-dollar companies are major players in our industry. This is literally a new layer of business and ownership. They are almost entirely focused on the top 3-5% of businesses in our space.

In the meantime, 95% of SMB IT consists of and serves 1-4 person companies. The continued growth at the top seems unsustainable. So . . . where is all this going?

Topic Three - A Practical Approach to AI

There's some (seemingly) conflicting research with AI adoption. Forrester highlighted the benefits of Copilot adoption for SMB. Lots of benefits, increased revenue, lower employee attrition, and more. At the same time, The Information reports that customers give Copilot mixsed reviews. Large corporations are increasing their usage, but tend not to use the paid version.

Is this a conflict? How do we make sense? Obviously, we have three opinions.

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That's it for Q4 and for 2024. We'll be backin Q1 2025!

:-)