thoughts on changing technologies

And another excellent presentation from Simon Wardley on the topic.

Cloud Computing is a generic term used to describe the disruptive transformation in IT towards a service-based economy driven by a set of economic, cultural, and technological  conditions.

His definition moves our thinking away from the narrow, vendor-driven definition of cloud computing (relating to products and technologies) to include the social, economic factors leading to this shift to services. Spot on I say. From OSCON 2009:

New York soon will hum, the Electric Car has come

- “Stupid” by the Long Winters

Maybe it was too soon to write off GM as they recently announced that the new plugin hybrid Chevy Volt will get an EPA rating of a staggering 230 mpg. The Toyota Prius only gets 51 MPG in the city so this announcement is pretty incredible. As it is a plugin hybrid and if you have a short commute, you could potentially never be using the gas ”generator” if you plugged your Volt in each night. 

Imagine what a game changer that would be to the automobile and oil industries?

I’m also imagining how eerily quiet the streets will become in this world of electric cars. I’ll have to be more careful jaywalking…

It’s taken me a while to get the right catch-phrase for what I’ve called “user” or “consumer” computing. I may start using “Technology Populism” as coined by Forrester Research:

Thanks to an advancing technology-native workforce, ubiquitous broadband, and abundant collaboration and Social Computing tools, information workers can now provision their own software tools, information sources, and social networks via the Web to support their jobs. Individual people, not IT organizations, are fueling the next wave of IT adoption we’re calling Technology Populism.

You don’t have to go very far to realize the users have taken over. Our web analytics tool on the tru.ca site shows growth in personal devices beyond desktops and laptops connecting to our services. Check out the top Operating Systems of devices connecting:

1. Windows
2. Mac
3. Linux
4. iPhone
5. iPod
6. Playstation 3
7. Symbian OS
8. Nintendo Wii

Gasp, what’s a poor IT department to do, especially with all the potential data loss, security breaches, islands of information, intellectual property challenges that these “rogue” users could possibly create for the organization?

I reckon the trick will be to get the mix right between good policy and practices to support our client’s information needs. Help with integrations and flexible enterprise architecture and reporting. Maybe try out some new stuff…

We could also do a lot of work to make those Web 0.0 enterprise applications work as easily as most web apps today. IT folk need to take a deep breath and think back to all those new technologies like mini computers and PC’s to realize a rationalization process will occur. This diagram nicely illustrates these waves:

Interesting developments on the desktop front these days. First Google Chrome turns from browser platform to Operating System, something I guessed would happen nearly a year ago. Chrome differs from Android in that it is designed for computers like netbook users who want to quickly boot to the web, not smart phones where Android will run. From the official Google Blog:

Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android. Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems. While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.

Google rolls out the Chrome OS to us mortals in late 2010.

But as Google strikes at the heart of Microsoft’s business, the Microsoft empire has struck back. Recently Microsoft announced it is releasing a free version of its Office Web product. Competitively, this is interesting on a number of levels:

1) Office Web, unlike the Google Apps Premium product which costs $50 USD per year, will be free to licensed customers like TRU;

2) The portability created by supporting the legacy of Microsoft document types. For as long as I can remember, the MS-Office file types (XLS, DOC, MDB, PPT etc) have been the de facto standard for productivity documents, and;

3) Office Web can be hosted either internally or externally. This will simplify the decision to deploy Office Web now our own data centre, versus having to bet the farm on Cloud versions of the software.

I’ll be interested to see if Office Web has the same document sharing strengths of Google Docs and the level of integration with Active Directory.

Anyone else thinking that Google may be the new Microsoft?

This just in. I love youtube. But is the youtube business model really sustainable? I’ve heard conflicting reports but my understanding is that the bandwidth costs alone of youtube exceed $1 million/day. That doesn’t include the cost of servers and the petabytes of storage required for all those videos.

I’m probably not alone in saying that few people click through the ads in youtube or facebook. Twitter doesn’t have any ads to click on. But youtube and twitter are really great things. Perhaps in the future they will need to be funded like public television? Just a thought…

Even the heavyweight pundits of all things Web 2.n are weighing in on the debate. Malcolm Gladwell (Blink, Tipping Point etc.) thinks that the free model in practice is unsustainable whereas Chris Anderson (The Long Tail, Free: The Future of Radical Price) thinks that content will remain free. While Anderson’s book is on my reading list at first glance I’d have to side with Gladwell on this one. I remember talk 10 years ago in the dot com boom that business models that had actual revenues and profits were obsolete. I don’t buy that. I’m not even convinced about the validity of Anderson’s concept of “Long Tail Ecomomics.” Most people the world over frequent only the same handful of sites each day (see Alexa.com)  Heck because of the Internet, it would appear that people are choosing from a pool of fewer and fewer names for their babies.

And free or not free, youngsters aren’t even using facebook as much as they used to as facebook’s drop in growth rates in the high school and college cohorts shows:

With the end of the car culture upon us, it has suddenly become unfashionable to own big, expensive cars.

For the very first time, Americans are driving less than ever before. This is bad news for bankrupted GM as the market for its products has perhaps gone forever.

Americans Driving Less for the First Time

Today, the best car to own is no car. That said, I did  replace a gas-guzzler for a small car recently. While not a hybrid or electric vehicle, the car gets excellent fuel economy and qualified for a tax incentive because of its ultra low emissions.

For all its green values, the thing I like best about the car is the iPod interface. That USB port connecting the iPod to the car and 4,000+ songs and audio books had me thinking about how simple technologies could make driving really better. If I had a smart-phone connected to my car’s USB, (instead of my first generation iPod) and that USB talked to all those sensors in the car, I could transmit speed, location and my direction to a car “network” to other cars sharing the road, we’d have some pretty cool things happening.

This network could improve traffic flows and reduce air pollution by load balancing roadways based on current use. Toll booths and truck scales could be eliminated through automation. Accidents could be reduced by automobile equivalents of collision detection systems. New business models like metered use of shared cars and insurance-by-the-kilometer arrangements could be developed.

Imagine if you just wanted to borrow/rent a truck for the afternoon to move some unfeasibly large wicker chairs. Your smart phone would tell you where an available truck-for-hire was waiting. You could then unlock the vehicle from your phone and do your errand, leaving at it your house for the next user. Heck you wouldn’t even have to own a car at all.Or if you owned one, you could rent out your vehicle on the car network while you were toiling away at work.

Maybe GM could build this network, using open source standards…

There’s a great article in this week’s  Economist on Automobile Technologies on this topic too.

Move way over web 2.0, it would appear the “real-time web” is here. From twitter to facebook updates, the instant connectivity in the “stream” is the new service-bus between man and machine. Applications like twitter may evolve beyond 140 character sound bites and news updates to become your programming interface to the world. Maybe. 

Have you noticed the machine-like syntax has crept into tweets – with its requisite @ and # commands? I’d submit that tweets will be unreadable into the future. (Some already are.) And you now need a users guide to operate twitter - albeit a clever powerpoint from Tim O’Reilly. 

Why not tweet appliances as well as friends:

@bbq start @dvr lost @frank #beer

(Of course you would have to follow all your appliances…)

Why stop there. Perhaps you could tweet money by introducing new twitter operators…

@maria %$25

Book and pay for airplane tickets

@AC &YVR &CDG (21/05/09) (30/05/09) !Vegetarian %$2000

Not only will the stream take care of all your ecommerce, it will let your friends know your travel plans and dietary habits. Who needs to say “I’m going to Paris” when they can just reverse engineer your booking command?

The stream may turn out to be the command line king’s dream. Maybe.

An old classic on this rainy day.

I'm a tweenbot but you can call me Blanche DeBois!

If you are a robot lost in a big city, it helps to be small, vulnerable and cute as artist and student Kacie Kinzer discovered with her tweenbots experiment. Those lovable androids with only a “forward” setting were helped by passersby on their mission across Washington Square park in NY. I’m just an IT guy but I reckon there are some complex man/machine interactions in play here.

Just love the tweenbots! Even the music in the video will cheer you up.

Zappos (Spanish: Zapatos: Shoes) the online shoe company has a nice set of core values. In this time of global economic meltdowns and Malthusian information famines, it’s nice, (almost quaint) to see a set of core values that guide this organization.

From their website

1. Deliver WOW through Service
2. Embrace and Drive Change
3. Have Fun and a Little Weirdnes
4. Be Adventurous, Creative and Open-Minded
5. Pursue Growth and Learning
6. Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
7. Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
8. Do More with Less
9. Be Passionate and Determined
10. Be Humble

An excellent list – I especially like the “little weirdness” part. I reckon every day would be a bit David Lynch-ian around the water cooler. In a time of great cynicism, and surviving office workers portrayed as automatons in TV’s The Office, it’s nice to see this jaunty throwback to the dot com era and business school aphorisms.

While “yammer” has yet to take off here, Zappos staff are encouraged to twitter. Cool.