Here’s an interesting question to consider: would the IT industry improve during the next, say, five years if there were no improvements in hardware technology? Think about it: no new mainframes from IBM, no new desktop computers from Dell, no shiny new Powerbooks from Apple. No breathless announcements of a new hard disk that stores a terabyte of data in the space of an iPod Shuffle. No new announcements from the folks working on the Hundred Dollar Laptop. No new … well, you get the idea.

Some IT organizations might react to this by saying, “Sounds like business as usual.” Because of the recession, or because of the accounting department’s way of handling capital investments, they might well be stuck with the current generation of hardware technology for another 5 years, whether they like it or not. And it could well take them five years to accomplish all of the new systems, and improvements on old systems, that they had in mind when they first acquired their latest batch of hardware.

Conversely, some IT organizations might acquire brand new, latest-and-greatest hardware technology, and experience no improvements at all. They might find that they’re still doing the same old thing they were doing five years ago, just a little faster. The text editor that I’m using to write this blog post, for example, would have run just as well on the laptop that I bought in 2005 as it does on the new laptop that I’m using today. If the response time for certain activities that I carry out with the editor is 5 milliseconds instead of 10 milliseconds, who would even notice?

You could also make the argument that if our hardware technology remained static for the next 5-10 years, while our needs and desires continued to grow, we would find a way to accomplish those needs and desires with software, or by reengineering our business processes. Or to put it another way: we often forget what amazing things we did in the distant past, using technology that we would consider primitive today. We landed a man on the moon more than 40 years ago, using mainframe technology and onboard computers that were several orders of magnitude less powerful than the technology inside our mobile phones today.

On the other hand, we could also compile a long list of things that would not have been possible if we had not achieved the remarkable improvements in hardware technology that have taken place all through my adult life. When I first started working in the computer field in 1964, I was told by my boss that I was among the lucky few who would be programming the PDP-5 minicomputer — a box about the size of a standard refrigerator, with approximately 6K bytes of memory, and paper tape as the primary form of external storage; it had less computational power than the digital watch I’m wearing today. If you had asked me to program the kind of applications that we all take for granted today, I would have suggested that you commit yourself to the nearest insane asylum.

So, while hardware advances may not be the only way to enhance the future of IT, and while they cannot even guarantee that future IT systems will be better than what we have today, they are obviously an important element in the equation. I’ll begin looking at this in the next blog posting, by paying tribute to Moore’s Law; and then we’ll look at the likely consequences of future improvements in CPU power, memory/storage capacity, cost of hardware, “footprint,” and networking technology. Stay tuned…