November 11th, 2012
I spent most of last week in Rome, presenting a three-day seminar on “Managing Agile Projects” for Technology Transfer Institute. If you were stuck in some other part of the world, or if you couldn’t persuade your boss to send you to Rome, you can click here to view and download the 47.9MB) PDF version of the [...]
June 6th, 2010
Aside from putting our faith in the continuation of Moore’s Law for another decade or two, how do we anticipate the future of IT? Let’s start by acknowledging that is not just one future lying ahead of us. There are many “potential” futures, some of which will come to fruition, and some of which will [...]
June 5th, 2010
The great anthropologist Margaret Mead popularized the terms postfigurative, cofigurative, and prefigurative — and it’s something we need to be aware of if we want to anticipate the impact of future IT technology. (See Mead’s Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap for more details.) A postfigurative culture is one in which things don’t [...]
June 4th, 2010
To anticipate the social impact of future IT, it would help to be an expert sociologist with a perfect crystal ball. I don’t have such expertise, so I’ll restrict my comments to specific areas where I think I have some vague idea of what I’m talking about … and aside from that, I’ll simply recommend [...]
June 3rd, 2010
As soon as you start discussing future advances in IT, someone will make a familiar observation: not everyone embraces change. This is not news, and it’s not restricted to IT — or to any technology, for that matter. Some people resist changes in fashion, music, art, cuisine, politics, sports, religion, and technology. Some people are [...]
June 1st, 2010
The last several postings in this thread about the future of technology have focused on the consequences of hardware advances — e.g., all of the marvelous things we can look forward to in the next 5-10 years as a result of computers/chips that are 10-100 times cheaper, faster, smaller, etc. But as an intellectual exercise, [...]
May 31st, 2010
There is one last “dimension” of Moore’s Law to discuss briefly — the continuing advance in our communication networks. Again, all you need to do is think back a few years (well, all right, maybe more than just a few) to the era of 100-baud modems, followed by 300 baud, 1200 baud, and then 2,400 [...]
May 30th, 2010
In an earlier blog in this series, I reminisced about an experience I had had in a mainframe computer room, back in the mid-1960′s: a high-speed drum, roughly the size of a family-size washing machine, had begun vibrating so hard that it snapped the bolts anchoring it to the floor, and began vibrating its away [...]
May 29th, 2010
In previous blogs, I’ve discussed the possible impact and consequences of several “dimensions” of technology advances predicted by Moore’s Law — e.g., what happens if we see tenfold, or hundredfold, improvements in the speed and cost of computers? Today I’ll explore another such dimension: size, or “footprint.” What happens when computers get ten times smaller? [...]
May 27th, 2010
Yesterday I blogged about one obvious consequence of the cost reductions that Moore’s Law brings to us with computer technology: the likelihood of ubiquitous computing in the next few years. Today, I’ll blog about three other consequences: Disposable computers Multiple computer gadgets for everyone, not just one Shift in power, as scarce technology becomes a [...]
