The tools basically consist of security features on top of open-source tools that are frequently used to build cloud-computing apps: Apache’s Hadoop distributed file system, Google’s Mapreduce and the University of Cambridge’s XEN Virtual Machine monitor. The research team at UT Dallas has focused on tools that will provide secure query processing, as well as tools that store sensitive data in encrypted format in order to add security to data storage devices.

The work is based on a project being carried out for the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and additional steps are being planned to include the departments of Defense, Justice and Homeland Security, as well as various intelligence agencies and other companies. Demonstration of the tools is already under way at King’s College London and the University of Insubria in Italy.

It’s far too early to tell whether this particular set of tools will become widespread, commercialized, and “mainstream.” But the fact that the research and development is underway, and that it’s being sponsored and supported by such prestigious organizations, is promising. As the article says, “the biggest obstacle to wide adoption of cloud computing is concern about the security of sensitive data,” and the work underway at the UT Dallas Cyber Security Research Center encourages me to hope that we will have robust tools in the not-too-distant future, with which to build cloud-based systems that organizations and individuals can trust with their most sensitive data.

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 be ignored rejected. Your future may not be the same as my future; and of the millions of possible futures, many will overlap, and some will conflict. Indeed, some futures may nullify other futures, and some futures may look so appealing that they shift attention away from others that could be more beneficial in the long term.

None of us has the time, resources, or energy to identify and track all possible futures; all we can do is identify the ones we think are most likely to be of interest to ourselves, our family and friends, our employers and customers and business partners, and the society in which we live. We can nurture and plan for the futures that appear more appealing, and we can plan for, and perhaps mitigate, the ones that appear more problematic (e.g., the ones that involve pollution or severe climate change or global conflict).

Some potential futures are more visible than others; indeed, a few of them really are secret. Steve Jobs is not going to tell us what the next iPhone looks like; we’ll have to wait until he unveils it, or until some unlucky Apple employee leaves the next prototype behind in a bar. IBM and Oracle aren’t going to publish their product plans for the next 5 years in the Wall Street Journal. And Google isn’t going to reveal the details of the next generation of search-engine technology until they’re ready.

But even secretive companies like Apple have to file patent applications to protect the intellectual property they’re working on. And they have to publish “help wanted” ads to advertise job openings in the areas they’re planning to exploit in the near-term future. No doubt there are some government/military R&D groups who really, truly hide everything they do; but overall, the world is becoming more and more of an open book — if you go looking to see what’s out there.

Indeed, the irony is that the people with the most innovative ideas are desperate to tell as many people as possible. They do so in traditional ways, by publishing papers in scientific journals, and giving talks at industry conferences. They visit the big companies — the IBMs and Microsofts and Googles — looking for financial support, strategic partnerships, or outright acquisition of their ideas and whatever startup company they’ve created to develop and exploit those ideas. They visit venture capitalists, they talk to bloggers, the attend “meet-ups” in high-technology cities around the world, and they do their best to use Twitter and Facebook and other social media to help spread the news about their ideas, with the hope that it will go “viral” somehow.

Some of their ideas are in the form of university experiments; it may take several years (and several millions of dollars) to transform that research into an “operationalized” future that can change the world. But some of it is already in use — but just by a few dozen, or a few hundred, adventurous innovators and early adopters who don’t really care if anyone else is paying attention. Indeed, the who point of Geoffrey Moore’s classic book, Crossing the Chasm, was that a “chasm” exists between the small marketplace of early adopters and the massive (profitable!) marketplace of “mainstream” adopters — and that many startup companies fall into that chasm (and ultimately go bankrupt) because they don’t know how to get across to the other side.

If you’re a venture capitalist with a large bankroll for funding new projects, or if you’re the VP of Business Development at Google, IBM, Apple, Microsoft, or other such high-tech companies, then the future will come knocking on your door — in the form of bright, passionate inventors who are determined that their new ideas will change the world, if only you’ll give them some money and a quiet place to work.

But if you’re anyone else, then you’ll probably have to go looking for the future … or, more accurately, lots of possible futures. I first saw this in action back in the 1980s, when I traveled to Singapore and was invited to meet some of the people at a government-funded IT research organization. I was told that the organization had a group known as the “horizon scanning” department — whose job was to actively seek out new ideas and new technologies that were “on the horizon,” or perhaps just a little bit over the horizon … because the people involved those futures might not have the time, energy, resources, or interest to get on a plane and travel to Singapore to present their ideas. (Remember: this was in the prehistoric era before Google, before the World-Wide web, and even before open, global email. We did have fire, electricity, and running water, but not much else…)

With today’s technology, almost anyone can be a “horizon scanner,” but it’s easy to get distracted and waste a lot of time and resources going off on a dozen wild goose chases. An excellent blog posting, Horizon Scanning, provides some of the details of “systematically exploring the external environment to (1) better understand the nature and pace of change in that environment, and (2) identify potential opportunities, challenges, and likely future developments relevant to your organization.” The blog goes on to recommend a combination of “out of the box thinking; exposure to many sources, ideas, and challenges; looking beyond existing “comfort zones”; and noting opportunities and risks in an ordered fashion.

Horizon scanning can be done in several timeframes: on an ad hoc basis (e.g., in response to an unexpected crisis), on a regular schedule (e.g., one a year), or on a continuous basis. Interestingly, the group I met in Singapore emphasized the “continuous” nature of their horizon-scanning.

Even the best-organized horizon-scanning process is unlikely to identify a single future in any particular area (e.g., future computer technology); nor will it be able to forecast a future trend with absolute precision or absolute certainty. Inevitably, this means that business leaders and government leaders will find themselves having to make decisions about the future (e.g., whether or not to invest in a specific technology that may or may not be available in four, five, or six years), based on incomplete, imperfect information.

Of course, you could argue that that’s what leaders do. In a free-market, capitalistic society, the ones who do it well are paid the big bucks; and the ones who do it poorly fail, and go out of business. Those who fail to make any decision at all, because of the risk and uncertainty, eventually find that the future has become a fait accompli that forces them to change or fall by the wayside.

But at least in some areas, an alternative model is emerging — based on the “wisdom of the crowd.” Basically, this involves taking into account the collective opinion of a group of individuals, rather than a single expert (or leader), to assess the likelihood of a particular outcome. This is a whole subject unto itself, and rather than blabber about it endlessly in this blog, I recommend that you take a look at the Wikipedia summary of the concept, and follow that up with a review of James Surowiecki’s book, The Wisdom of Crowds. I also suggest that you take a look at a concept known as “prediction markets,” which provide a mechanism for a “crowd” to express, update, and revise its assessment of the likelihood of various outcomes occurring. One company that provides a very interesting service in this area is Inkling Markets; I have no business relationship at all with the company, but I’m intrigued with what they’re doing, and suggest that you take a look at their service.

One last recommendation, based on some of the other trends that we’ve discussed in this thread of blog postings: make sure that your “crowd” and your horizon-scanning process includes plenty of people from the younger generation (e.g., high-school and college students who have not yet entered the work force), and make sure it includes plenty of people from developing nations and poor countries — i.e., people who probably don’t have advanced computer technology today, but who almost certainly will within the next 5-10 years.

Aside from that, you’re on your own. As American E.B. White once said, “I wake up each morning determined to change the World … and also to have one hell of a good time. Sometimes that makes planning the day a little difficult.”

***********

A postfigurative culture is one in which things don’t really change much, from one generation to another. Thus, aside from the rebellious behavior associated with adolescence, each generation expects to learn the “basics” of life from its parents and grandparents. Such cultures learn by looking back, to see how things were done in the past; and this worked reasonably well for most of mankind’s recorded history.

A cofigurative society is one in which things are changing rapidly enough that parents and children are forced to learn things more-or-less simultaneously. Immigrant families face this quite often, and it’s commonplace for the children of such families to adapt to new languages, new laws, and new social customs more quickly and more easily than their parents. Aside from immigration and chaotic disasters, Dr. Mead suggested that somewhere around World War II, the rapid pace of technology began to create an overall cofigurative society — at least in the advanced countries that were inventing, developing, and assimilating those new technologies.

Though there is still some debate among sociologists, many of us would agree that we are now venturing into a prefigurative society — where things are changing so quickly that it’s almost guaranteed that children will learn about new things before their parents do. Part of this is because learning something new often requires us to unlearn something old; and the generation of adults has a lot more “baggage” to get rid of, before they can accept and assimilate something new. Children, on the other hand, have little or nothing vested in old fashions, old styles, old customs, and old ways of doing things that were based on technologies that are being rendered obsolete.

Every adult has his or her own stories to tell about this phenomenon. When I was a kid, for example, I was told that I would not be allowed to drive a car until I could change a spark plug, replace a fan-belt, and fix a flat tire on the family car; and both at home and at school, I was told that I had to learn how to drive a manual, “stick-shift” car. All of the time and energy that went into that part of my basic “education” was essentially wasted: I haven’t had a flat tire in over 20 years, and I have no idea if my car even has a spark plug. (In fact, I don’t even own a car any more, but that’s a different story.) Today’s kids learn how to drive automatic-transmission cars, and I doubt that most of them could even find the spare tire in their trunk. When my older son bought his first car, he was dumbfounded when I suggested that he could save a few bucks by getting a simpler model with an old-fashioned “manual” crank to open and close the windows; for his entire life, every car he had ever been in had an automatic “button” that, when pressed, caused the windows to move up or down.

So, what does this mean in terms of the future of IT? Well, it means that if we’re in the business of inventing/creating new IT-based products or services, or if we are in a (management) position that attempts to control or restrict access to those technologies, we’d better not assume that they’ll react and respond the same way we do. Fortunately, there are lots of market-research firms, academic institutions, and industry-analysts out there polling the public about their attitudes, behavior, expectations, likes and dislikes — and then slicing and dicing the results into different age groups, income categories, and other demographic distinctions.

So we need to devote some time and energy — on an ongoing basis — to reading these polls, and talking directly to the more articulate members of the younger generation, and then think carefully about what this means, in terms of the assumptions we’ve made about new technology. We read, for example, that today’s generation not only does not memorize the phone numbers of their twenty or thirty closest friends (as my peers and I did, once upon a time), but a significant percentage of them don’t even know their own phone number. Why should they? It’s all programmed into their mobile phones, complete with the textual name associated with each number, and a photo of the individual associated with that number. What are the implications of this behavior? Aside from the annoying reality that when people lose their cellphones today, they have no idea how to reach any of their peers, it probably does have some deeper meaning … but I haven’t figured it out.

Similarly, we read that most young people today don’t wear a wrist-watch — because their mobile phone displays the current time. And perhaps that explains why 91% of mobile phone users today keep their phone within a one-meter distance of themselves, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (see Mary Meeker’s presentation at the 2007 Web 2.0 Summit conference for this statistic.) And since it’s only a (short) matter of time before virtually every mobile phone has a built-in GPS device, we’ll always know where everyone is — even if they don’t know exactly where they are. We may think we know what this means, from our perspective, in terms of potential new products, new services, new laws and regulations about privacy and security and control … but what does it mean to the younger generation that’s most likely to have these devices in their pockets?

On a deeper level, all of this will have a profound impact on the way future generations interact with their peers, their parents, their employers, and the “authority figures” in their lives. We’re already beginning to get a sense of this with the attitudes of today’s “digital natives” — i.e., the generation that was born during the period that PC’s were beginning to be introduced, and which has thus grown up in a world that always (from their perspective) had computers. As Gary Hamel explained in a thought-provoking March 2009 Wall Street Journal blog entitled “The Facebook Generation vs. the Fortune 500,” we can already see a number of younger-generation attitudes that are very much in conflict with the “traditional” attitudes that we find in large business organizations:

• All ideas compete on an equal footing – (every idea has the chance to gain a following; ideas gain traction based on their perceived merits, rather than political power of their sponsors)
• Contribution counts for more than credentials — (when you post a video on YouTube, nobody asks if you went to film school)
• Hierarchies are natural, not prescribed — (some individuals command more respect and attention than others; authority trickles up, not down)
• Leaders serve, rather than preside — (no one has the power to command or sanction)
• Groups are self-defining and -organizing – (no one can assign you a boring task, no one can force you to work with dim-witted colleagues)
• Resources get attracted, not allocated — (the Web is a market economy; people decide, moment by moment, how to spend the precious currency of their time and attention
• Power comes from sharing information, not hoarding it — (to gain influence and status, you have to give away your expertise and content)
• Opinions compound and decisions are peer-reviewed — (truly smart ideas rapidly gain a following no matter how disruptive they may be)
• Users can veto most policy decisions — (the only way to keep users loyal is to give them a substantial say in key decisions
• Intrinsic rewards matter most — (money is great, but so is recognition and joy of accomplishment)
• Hackers are heroes — (online communities frequently embrace those with strong anti-authoritarian views)

Undoubtedly, there are a lot of business executives and parents and “authority figures” (politicians, religious leaders, pundits, and op-ed columnists) who will respond to the list above by saying, “Well, that’s not how we do things around here — and we never will!”

If you hear this from the authority figures in North Korea or Iran or a few other such places in the world, they may be right. But to a greater and greater degree in the rest of the world, it’s an outmoded way of thinking. For better or worse, technology has empowered the younger generation — and they will not only vote with the ballot box (or electronic voting machine), but also with their pocketbook and with their feet. They’ll walk away from their job in stuffy, conservative, technology-fearing company X, and they’ll get a new job (even if pays less) in open, friendly, collaborative company Y.

Thus, the ultimate question for us to ponder when we think about the future of technology is not “What will it be?” but rather “How will the kids react to it?”

For example, we know that “social media” — Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and several other examples — are becoming ever more popular, and also ever more important as an “influence” in society. As of January 2010, for example, Twitter had 75 million users (see “Twitter now has 75M users; most asleep at the mouse“, in the Jan 26, 2010 issue of Computerworld); and while Computerworld felt it was important to emphasize that “a lot of current Twitterers are inactive,” it’s also true that those who do Twitter have a disproportionate influence. It’s not just Oprah and Ashton Kutcher, with their multi-million Twitter armies, but the fact that that protesters and dissidents and ordinary citizens are using Twitter to communicate news more quickly and more effectively than the traditional media.

Cynics might well argue that 75 million is actually a very small fraction — just over 1% — of the global population. But Facebook has a user base that is estimated to be approaching 500 million. True, that’s still less than 10% of the global population; but as of April 2009, it was the fifth largest “country” in the world with a mere 200 million users (see “200 Million Strong,” in an April 8, 2009 posting on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s blog)… which means that, by now, it’s the third largest country in the world, with only China and India ahead of it.

Of course, Facebook (and MySpace, and the various others like it) is only a “virtual” country; it doesn’t have an army, it doesn’t have a Parliament, and it doesn’t have a seat at the United Nations. But maybe it should … and maybe it will. Probably not in the next 5-10 years, but it does suggest that we should start paing more attention to the blurring of “real life” and “virtual life.” Thus far, most of our attention has focused on the “virtual life” of individuals (see, for example, the excellent book, Life on the Screen, by Sherry Turkle), or relatively small “virtual communities” of individuals, in places like SecondLife.

We’ll know that things have changed irrevocably when Facebook (or MySpace or Twitter, or whatever) achieves some significant political accomplishment, such as getting a major politican elected or thrown out of office. Note that that’s completely different than the “top-down” efforts by politicians (e.g., Barack Obama) to use social media to help promote their own campaigns.

The social/political impact of future IT will, of course, become all the more important as computing becomes more ubiquitous. You’ll recall that I discussed this in part 5 of this thread of blogs (you’ve memorized all this stuff, right?), and suggested that in another 5-10 years, we might well find that a majority of the human race will have non-trivial computing devices, even if it takes the form of a mobile phone. So, if Facebook (and/or its cousins) grows from 500 million users to 5 billion users, there are bound to be some significant social/cultural consequences — the details of which I’m incapable of predicting with any specificity.

One thing is fairly obvious, though: if we’ve got 5 billion people using computers, the majority of them will be located in what we casually refer to as “third world” countries … or, more politely, “developing countries.” That means the applications that dominate the worldwide computing environment probably won’t be the ones that currently dominate the marketplace in advanced/developed countries. They might be “simple” applications that we have relegated to a back corner, like e-mail or texting; or they might be games that we’ve never seen before. Or they might be something else entirely … in any case, what creates this dominance will be culture, not technology.

One last observation, which I’ll just summarize — even though it probably deserves several blog postings on its own: the relationship between government and members of society will change, and the boundary between government and citizens will blur. I can make some educated guesses about the general nature of this change, but the details of how and when … I simply don’t know.

As for the “relationship”: recall that in part 12 of this thread, we discussed the phenomenon of resistance to change. Specifically, to the extent that new technology threatens to disrupt established political (power) structures, and/or social and religious cultures, it will almost certainly threaten to disrupt established laws, regulations, and other forms of codified behavior.

Of course, most societies have organized methods for changing their existing laws and regulations, but (a) it takes a long time, and (b) it tends to operate from the top down. Yeah, yeah, the people at the grass roots can elect new representatives, Presidents, and Prime Ministers; but unless you live in a society that operates with a “direct” town-hall-style consensus, the reality is that the day-to-day establishment of laws and codes and regulations comes from the folks at the top. And (a) they’re likely to be the same ones who were at the top five years ago, and (b) they’re likely to be 50 or 60 years old, if not older, and (c) they still haven’t figured out e-mail.

But all of that could change if you get a “Facebook army” that’s determined to make some changes. We got a minor taste of this when Twitter got used by the protesters in Iran after their controversial election last year … and I think that was just the beginning.

The other aspect of government is this: in the best of all worlds (without getting into the usual debates between liberals and conservatives), we expect government to do the things that we (individuals) cannot do for ourselves. I don’t expect a “Facebook army” to acquire guns or tanks or planes, and thus replace the government’s army and air force; and I don’t expect the “Facebook army” to start building the next generation of roads and bridges and tunnels.

But they might take on some of the responsibilities for repairing the roads and bridges and tunnels. Well, maybe even that is too much, since they’re unlikely to have the heavy equipment. But to the extent that any of this (even national defense) depends upon effective communication and collaboration — that much can be done by a Facebook army. What it means is that a lot of governmental organizations — bureaucratic committees and agencies and authorities — might find that their services were no longer needed.

Is this likely to happen in the next 5-10 years? Obviously, not completely … and maybe not at all. But it could happen little by little, without make a lot of noise, and thus without creating a lot of resistance. Want an example? Take a look at Clever Commute, and subscribe to the Clever Commute blog — I think it’s an exemplar of things to come.

As we discussed in one of the earlier postings in this blog thread, there is a significant difference between “incremental” change, and “order-of-magnitude” change. Indeed, from a social perspective, “order-of-magnitude” changes might better be termed “disruptive changes” — for they turn things upside down, render established ways of doing things obsolete and irrelevant, and threaten established scientific, governmental, religious, social, and cultural norms.

As the late Thomas Kuhn observed in his classic book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, this has been true for centuries, if not longer. Nicolaus Copernicus, for example, had the audacity to propose that Ptolemy’s view of an earth-centered solar system was incorrect, and that the earth actually revolved around the sun. It took the Catholic Church three years (after the publication of his book, On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, in 1543) to even take notice of this radical theory, and sixty years to take action against it. But in 1616, the church issued a decree suspending the book, placing it on the Index of Prohibited Books. As if that wasn’t enough, Galileo Galilei was convicted in 1633 of heresy for “following the position of Copernicus, which is contrary to the true sense and authority of the Holy Scripture,” and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.

We probably don’t have to worry about being excommunicated today for proposing new scientific theories, or possible applications of new technology — though it’s not always easy to distinguish that kind of knee-jerk reaction from the kind of Internet-related censorship that we see in countries like China, Iran, and Pakistan. Putting religion aside for now, it’s still worth noting that various computer-related technologies have been attacked, prohibited, regulated, belittled, and criticized over the past few decades. In the Web 2.0 world, for example, we’ve seen problems like these:

• resistance to user-generated content — e.g., blogs
• strong resistance to the idea of letting employees blog about their work, in the office
• rejection of web-based products (e.g., Google Apps) as “too lightweight”
• rejection of Facebook applications by various pundits as being “trivial” or “frivolous”
• rejection of “cloud” computing

While it took the Catholic Church decades to decide that Copernicus’ theories were heretical, and then centuries to remove that criticism (Pope Paul VI abolished the “List of Prohibited Books” in 1966), most individuals and organizations react and respond to new ideas and new technologies a bit more quickly … but not instantaneously!

Indeed, one of the most important things for champions, evangelists, and advocates of new technology must be aware of is the so-called “technology adoption cycle,” popularized by Geoffrey Moore in a book from the early 1990s, Crossing the Chasm. Based on earlier work by Everett Rogers on the diffusion of technology, Moore proposed five “categories” of technology adapters:

• innovators – the “pioneers” who want to obtain a strategic advantage by being the first in their neighborhood, their town, or their industry, to use the new technology
• early adopters — typically representing about 15% of the overall market, these are the people who see an opportunity for making a big improvement in some way that matters greatly to them — e.g., more revenues, bigger market share, higher profits, etc.
• early majority — these are the more conservative potential customer/users in the marketplace who are interested in improvements and benefits, but who typically want to wait until they see “case studies” of other people (i.e., the early adopters!) who have successfully used the technology
• late majority — even more conservative people, these are the ones that are typically driven by a desire for cost avoidance and/or cost displacement. They’re not so interested in (or willing to believe in) a 10% increase in revenues as they are interested in the possibility of a 10% reduction in costs.
• laggards — these are the people who will defer, avoid, and delay using the new technology until they have no alternative — e.g., their existing technology breaks down and cannot be repaired or replaced. It’s common to characterize the people in this group as “Luddites,” and indeed many of them are. But you’ll also find a lot of people from government agencies and non-profit organizations, whose budget restrictions are the main reason for waiting until the last possible moment to replace their old technology with something newer.

It’s easy to criticize the people who occupy both extremes on this chart, but that’s not the point I want to emphasize. The main thing I want to emphasize is that a finite period of time elapses between the first sign of a new technology (i.e., the extreme left side of the chart above) and the point where everyone is using the technology (i.e., the extreme right side). If you’re involved with new technology — either as a developer, evangelist, or potential user — you need to be aware of that.

My friend Capers Jones likes to remind me that it took the military 75 years to go from the technology of muskets to the technology of rifles; obviously things move somewhat faster with computer technology. Still, it was common to see a period of 15-20 years elapse between the innovators and the laggards for technologies like relational database, or client-server, etc. If you want something a little more specific and a little more recent, take a look at this May 2008 article, “20% of U.S. Has Never Sent E-mail.”

Some people hear a statistic like this and say, “Yeah, that’s my grandmother you’re talking about — and all the other grandparents in the country.” Aside from the fact that such a characterization is more and more untrue these days (see, for example, this 2009 blog, “Rise of the Silver Surfer – Germany Already Has More Internet Users 60+ Than Teens“), it speaks to the generational aspect of technology adoption. We’ll talk more about that in a future blog, if my fingers don’t fall off from doing too much typing today

The more important point to keep in mind these days is that technology adoption is occurring faster today. As an October 2009 blog, “Speed of Technology Adoption,” points out, it took roughly 50 years for electricity to permeate 90% of the market; it took 30 years for the refrigerator, and 20 years for the cellphone. I suspect it will be even faster for iPods, iPhones, iPads, and the i-thingies of the future.

Finally, one last piece of advice: you need to know what part of the technology adoption cycle you’re most comfortable with. Ideally, you (as an individual) and your employer, and your employer’s current and prospective customers are all at the same place in the cycle. It doesn’t matter (at least, not to me) whether you’re an innovator or a laggard or somewhere in between. The point is that if that’s how you (and your employer and your customers) reacted to the last technology innovation, that’s probably how you’re going to respond to the next one.

But there’s another perspective — the social perspective — in which we find ourselves asking, “How will we know when the future has arrived? Will we recognize it? Will we welcome it? What will we do with it? Will our children want to do the same kind of things that we do, and will we care?”

One way of approaching this part of the conversation is by reminding you of Clarke’s Laws, which were first published in his 1962 book, Profiles of the Future (the hyperlink I’ve provided here is for Amazon’s vintage-2000 paperback reprint):

• When a distinguished but elderly scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong.
• The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
• Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

There are, unfortunately, many many ridiculous predictions made by “distinguished but elderly scientists over the years. Here’s a representative list:
• In 1895, British Postmaster General Arnold Morley said, “Gas and water are necessities for every inhabitant of the Country. Telephones are not and never will be. It is no use trying to persuade ourselves that the use of the telephone could be enjoyed by the large masses of people in their daily life.” (see “Public Ownership and the Telephone in Great Britain,” Chapter VIII, p. 117)
• In 1903, soon after the first Wright Brothers flight, Rudyard Kipling predicted that airpseeds would reach only 300 mph by the year 2000.
• In 1927, J.B.S. Haldane predicted that the first landing on Mars would not take place for 10 million years.
• In 1943, IBM Chairman Thomas Watson may have said, “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” (see this Wikipedia article for discussion of alleged comment.)
• In 1945, FDR’s naval aide, Admiral William Leahy, said about the atomic bomb, “That is the biggest fool thing we have ever done … the bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives.”
• In 1949, “Popular Mechanics,” forecasting the relentless march of science, wrote “Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.”
• In 1977, DEC founder/CEO Ken Olsen remarked at a World Future Society conference that “There is no reason why anyone would want a computer in their home.”
• In 1981, an obscure computer geek named Bill Gates allegedly said, “640K bytes ought to be enough for anybody.” (But see this article for Gates’ denial that he ever said such a thing.)
Here are two other things to keep in mind as we think about the social aspects of future advances in technology: first, the people least likely to anticipate how new technology will be applied are the very inventors of the new technology.

And second, when you dramatically improved technology to people (e.g., a tenfold improvement), they first begin using the new technology to do the same old thing they were doing before, but somewhat faster or cheaper or more conveniently. It is only later that they begin to recognize entirely new and different things that are made possible with the new technology.

The first observation is not so surprising when you think about it. The inventors are desperately trying to persuade skittish investors, conservative business managers, and mainstream consumers that their new technology will be “useful” — so they try to imagine various applications and uses that could be seen as … well, “productive” and “serious” and “efficient”. Thus, Thomas Edison people that his newfangled invention, the phonograph, could be used to record the minutes of a business meeting, or a lecture by a university professor, or various other “serious” things. Using the phonograph to record music was way down near the bottom of his “top ten” list.

The second observation is often referred to as Fubini’s Law, which goes like this:

1. People initially use technology to do what they do now – but faster.
2. Then they gradually begin to use technology to do new things.
3. The new things change life-styles and work-styles
4. The new life-styles and work-styles change society.

… and eventually change technology.

As we’ll discuss about three or four blog postings from now, much of this behavior comes from the fact that adults have a “legacy” of experiences and lessons and guidelines and “common sense” about how to live their life, how to succeed, how to get things done. Through their own Darwinian behaviors, they’ve weeded out the practices and behaviors that have not served them well, and emphasized the ones that have served them well.

Thus, if you give them technology that is substantially more powerful than what they have now, their instinct is to make an incremental change in the practices and behaviors that have worked well in the past. There is an understandable reluctance to abandon everything that has worked well in the past, and try something “wild and crazy” with technology that is — or at least might be — then times better than what they had before.

With children, the situation is likely to be different, because (a) they have little or no legacy to guide them or hold them back, and (b) they have a natural tendency to rebel against anything and everything their parents are doing. We’ll discuss this further in a future blog posting…

But as an intellectual exercise, suppose for a moment that that was not true; suppose that we were doomed to continue using today’s hardware technology for the next 10 years. Would things get any better?

Those of us who have been working in the software industry for the past 40-50 years are likely to have a pessimistic reaction to such a scenario. “We’ve been writing lousy code, full of bugs, for the past 50 years — and we’ll probably continue to do so for the next 50 years. And we’ve been consistently over-budget and behind-schedule on our software development projects for the past 50 years — so why should we expect things to get any better in the next 50 years?”

Indeed, there is some cause for pessimism here, but there is also an optimistic response: “We have gotten better at project management, and we do write better software than we did 50 years ago. But as hardware technology has improved so astoundingly over the past several decades, business organizations and society, in general, have demanded that we solve bigger and more complex problems. And we have taken on bigger and more complex problems, until we reach the point that our efforts are just barely ‘good enough.’”

We could debate these pessimistic and optimistic perspectives for quite a long time, but for now we’ll put them aside. Back to the simple, straightforward question: what if we could only expect improvements in the computer industry from the “stuff” we do in software?

One thing is fairly obvious: it would take us another 5-10 years just to use the hardware we’ve already got! There are exceptions, of course, some of which we’ve hinted at in some of the previous postings in this blog thread. But particularly in the area of personal/home computers, and also in the area of small-business computers, we are using only a small fraction of the available computing resources. We could probably continue for another 5-10 years, writing the kind of “brute-force” software that lazy programmers have been able to write for the past decade or two; and at some point, we might have to start optimizing our code, and we might have to schedule the use of, and access to, our hardware resources. It would be extremely unpleasant to go back to the days of “batch scheduling” of computer jobs; and it would be unpleasant if we had to abandon the idea of dedicated, personal computing devices, and return to the days when lots of people had to share scarce hardware resources … but it could be done.

Again, let’s put that scenario aside for now. Let’s take a more positive, optimistic perspective: what kind of new, “good” things might we expect from the software industry? There’s one interesting perspective that we’ve been hearing from people for the past year or so: look how many apps are available on the iPhone! First it was 100,000 — which was pretty amazing — and then it was 150,000 and now it seems to be 200,000. Interestingly, I recall reading about numbers like this back in the late 1990s, when the Palm Pilot was all the rage. In a long-forgotten article in the Wall Street Journal (which I’m too lazy to track down on Google), I remember reading that Palm had cultivated a “cottage industry” of 40,000 developers who created tens of thousands of Palm apps, which they sold for a few dollars each. Of course, Palm didn’t have iTunes — and the mechanism for finding, purchasing, downloading, and installing the apps was time-consuming and tedious.

So now that we do have iTunes, does this mean we should expect a Moore’s-Law phenomenon with mobile apps? Will today’s figure of 200,000 apps escalate up to 2 million apps by 2015, and 20 million apps by 2020? Even if that were true (the likelihood of which I’ll discuss in a moment), it doesn’t necessarily mean that society will be fundamentally improved — if we had access to 2 million iPhone apps in 2015, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they would all be “killer apps.” In fact, only a small percentage of them would show up on everyone’s iPhone — but the rest could still serve a useful purpose, in the form of a “long tail” of “niche” apps that are only useful to a few people.

Indeed, the long-tail phenomenon is already quite visible in places like Amazon and the iTunes music store. In the old days, when music was sold on vinyl records, and books were only available on dead trees, retail outlets (e.g., book-stores and record stores) only had room for a limited inventory, and were thus constrained to stock and sell only their most popular items. But now, iTunes carries an inventory of approximately 5 million songs; and in any given fiscal quarter, almost every one of those 5 million songs sells at least one copy. And if it turns out that almost all of those songs sell only one copy, who cares? They’re all just bits on a disk drive, and it doesn’t really matter when you transmit one copy or a million copies to the customers who want them.

So maybe the software-driven future of technology is one in which we benefit from a long-tail phenomenon of millions of individual apps on the various hardware devices we have in our pockets, our purses, our homes, and our offices. But if that is the future, we need to ask: who will actually write all of those apps? People who already consider themselves programmers? Depending on whose estimate you believe, there may be a few million such individuals world-wide today, and if they spent their evenings and weekends working on clever apps (assuming that each of them had a clever idea), maybe that would get us from the current level of 200,000 iPhone apps to a couple million. Beyond that, I have my doubts…

Indeed, if we think that the most interesting version of the future consists of dramatically more application programs, we need to imagine a world in which people other than “professional” programmers could create them. Computer programming is no longer considered “rocket science,” so we don’t have to restrict our attention to people with university computer-science degrees; indeed, they don’t have to have any university degree. Even if we imagined that new apps required basic literacy and the educational equivalent of a high-school diploma, that would still be a very, very large number of people … indeed, perhaps enough to get us to the level of 20 million apps a decade from now.

To illustrate that this is not as crazy as it might sound, consider that until the mid-1970s, almost any kind of non-trivial computation for business, scientific, or engineering purposes required a programmer, who would hand-craft a program in FORTRAN to produce the required computational results. Today, we refer to such a program as a “spreadsheet,” and we refer to the “programmer” who creates it as a “person.” I don’t know how many copies of Excel have been sold by Microsoft, but I’m willing to be that it’s far more than 20 million; and there are many more than 20 million spreadsheets providing useful results.

So perhaps what we’re saying is that software-related technological advances will come from the introduction of a “tool” as simple and powerful as a spreadsheet, with which ordinary people can create whatever app they might imagine for their mobile computing device (or, for that matter, any computing device). Maybe it will be a “mashup” tool, developed along the lines of Yahoo Pipes, or the tools available from Microsoft and IBM and others. Maybe it will be some kind of widget, template, or other mechanism.

I don’t know if this is how the future will turn out, and I can think of one reason why there might be no relationship at all between the world of spreadsheet-developers, and the world of mobile-phone app developers. Consider this: spreadsheets are generally created in order to solve a “real” problem — e.g., because someone wants to add rows and columns of numbers in order to make a business decision. I’m sure there are exceptions, but most of us would not consider a spreadsheet to be “entertainment,” or “fun,” or some kind of “game.”

But if you look at the items in the iTunes App Store, the vast majority are games, fun, or somehow related to entertainment. There are, again, lots of exceptions (I’ve got only one game, Klondike, on my iPhone), and there are lots of apps that provide serious, productive solutions to some kind of problem. But you can’t get away from the fact that most of the apps are for amusement.

Not only that, they’re not for the amusement of the person who created the app. Instead, the app-developer is hoping to persuade others to play his game, and join in the entertainment. If millions of people are thus entertained, and if they’re willing to spend $0.99 to download and play the game, then the developer gets rich. Conversely, if nobody likes the game, or nobody even notices its existence, then the developer makes no money — and is likely to conclude that he wasted his time…

As for the “productive” apps that one finds on a mobile device, a large percentage are simply scaled-down versions of the same app that one already has on a laptop or desktop computer. In any case, though, here are the categories of apps that I think we’ll see a lot more of in the next several years, some of which may well turn out to be as much of a killer app as spreadsheets and Google:

• collaborative apps — it may be the next generation of Facebook, Twitter, and other “social media” apps, or perhaps something like the newly-released Google Wave
• virtual-world apps — most current versions of computer games could be thought of as a “virtual world” in which player(s) battle enemies, search for treasures, etc. But I think these will become far more sophisticated and intricate (e.g., like Second Life, with social rules and currencies), long-lasting, and multi-player in nature. If it can be embedded into your mobile device, with the ability to call, text, or email to you (and from you), it’s easy to imagine that some players could essentially abandon the “real world” altogether.
• more “location-aware” apps — indeed, the collaborative apps, and virtual-world apps, become all the more powerful if they know where they (and their associated human “owner”) are located, as well as knowing where other relevant participants/players are located. Looking at my iPhone, I see that roughly 25% of my apps are not only location-aware, but are able to use that information constructively. I think we’ve only begun to explore this area, because it’s only been the last couple of years that our mobile computing devices have had GPS mechanisms attached. The question to ask here, I think, is not what the “killer app” will be in the location-aware space, but rather who is likely to invent it…
• assistant/agent apps — aside from alarm clocks and simple “filters” that tell us if a designated keyword has been spotted in a newsfeed, most of today’s apps are fairly passive. We have to tell them that we want a task carried out, and we typically have to provide a great deal of specific data in order for the task to be performed. Tomorrow’s apps will gradually accumulate more and more “knowledge” about the humans they’re “connected” to, in terms of likes and dislikes, habits, areas of competence and expertise, short-term vs. long-term goals, willingness to make tradeoffs and compromises, etc. As a result, tomorrow’s apps will be able to take a more active role, offering advice, guidance, companionship, and warnings. Again, I have no idea what the specific “killer app” will be in this area; but it’s the generation of today’s children and teenagers that I think we should be watching for inspiration.

I’m not concerned here with the ongoing debates about which country has the fasted networks, or what percentage of the U.S. actually has broadband in their homes, or the various other issues about the current state of our networks. What I’m more interested in is future trends; and here we find that Butter’s Law — named after Gerald Butters, the former head of Lucent’s Optical Networking Group — says that the amount of data coming out of an optical fiber is doubling every nine months (see “Speeding Net Traffic With Tiny Mirrors“). And Nielsen’s Law (named after Jakob Nielsen) says that the bandwidth available to users increased by 50% annually, doubling every 21 months.

Whether this trend continues on, into the indefinite future, is beyond my ability to predict; but it does seem that we can look forward to significant improvements for at least the next 5-10 years. From what I’ve seen in the past decade, it seems that the biggest obstacle/limitation is likely to be infrastructure and the capital investment required to upgrade that infrastructure. Whether it’s building more transmission towers, or pulling more optical cable (or copper wire) to homes and buildings, it seems to be a problem analogous to the problem of upgrading our highways and railroad tracks to accommodate significantly faster cars and trains.

In any case, I think the biggest question is going to be similar to that facing us with faster, cheaper, smaller computers: what useful, interesting, fun things will we decide to do with networks that are 10 times, or perhaps even 100 times more powerful than what we have now? The first reaction is likely to be, “More of the same — but faster and cheaper.” Yes, of course we want to have movies that download onto our computer with no visible delay; and we want “streaming” video of live events, with no delays or glitches. But that doesn’t really strike me as innovative or transforming. It won’t really change our lives.

What will change our lives, I think, is an increase — on a grand scale — in communicating, always-on, location-aware devices. We’re already beginning to see this trend, with RFID devices implanted in more and more manufactured products. But it’s still a shock for many of us to turn on our iPhone in a strange city and type a query that says, “I don’t really know where I am, but I’d like to find a good Chinese restaurant nearby.” The iPhone basically says, “Well, maybe you don’t know where you are, but I do. And I also know about all kinds of things around you — like the location of the nearest bank, hospital, bar, and … oh, yes, the nearest Chinese restaurant.”

Most of what my iPhone knows consists of large, static thingies (like buildings) whose location has already been placed into a database (which, of course, it can access thanks to a WiFi network or a wireless communication service). But it probably knows about other iPhones nearby, and I think it’s only a matter of time before it will know about all nearby objects with “dynamic” locations (like the taxicab that’s about to knock you down as you step off the curb). And it will know about objects smaller than buildings and taxicabs, right down to the size of a paperclip.

Equally important, all of these devices will have the ability to recognize you (or your iPhone) and interact with you. As we saw in the 2002 Tom Cruise film, “Minority Report,” this could be an advertiser’s bonanza, with billboards and posters and other objects calling out to you, beseeching you to pay attention and buy their products. Indeed, it could be a Tower of Babel … but it probably won’t. How this technology gets put to use in a socially acceptable, and useful/beneficial way, will be one (of many) great things to watch over the next decade…

Oh, one final observation: to the extent that network communications do continue to improve according to Moore’s Law, and to the extent that this improvement ensures always-on, always-accessible, always-reliable networks, it can’t help but make today’s tentative adoption of “the cloud” more acceptable. Storage capacity may well increase by a factor of 10 or 100, but we’re still going to have a difficult time storing vast amounts of data on the ultra-miniature devices that proliferate all around us. And if I’ve got thousands of these devices all around me, I’m not going to want all of my data replicated on every device. I might be willing to use advanced networking capabilities to synchronize some of the data, but it’s more likely, I think, that we’ll use “thin” devices that read and write the data they need from vast servers in the cloud.

Fast forward about 15 years, and I was agog at the notion that I could buy an IBM PC/XT clone for a few thousand dollars, with a 10-megabyte hard disk. Obviously, they’ve gotten bigger and bigger since then; I’m writing this blog on a desktop iMac that’s a year or two old, with 750 gigabytes of storage. If I got a brand-new machine. Out of curiosity, I just checked the online Apple computer store — which tells me that I could buy a new iMac with a 27-inch display, 2.8-gigaHertz quad-core CPU, 16 GB of RAM, and 2 terabytes of hard-disk storage for a total price of $3,449. Oh, yeah, they’ll throw in free shipping.

So, if Moore’s Law holds true in the area of storage capacity for the next decade or so, that means I can look forward to the possibility of a vintage-2015 iMac with a 20-terabyte hard disk, and a vintage-2020 iMac with a 200-terabyte disk.

Which raises the obvious question: what on earth would I do with all that storage? What would you do? What do we expect that most companies would do, assuming they could scale up their current “disk farms” by a factor of ten, or 100?

Interestingly, I’ve always been one of those people who kept needing and wanting more, more, more storage. These days, for example, I delete 90% of the photos I take with my digital camera — because otherwise my hard disk would soon overflow. Even with this kind of discipline, I’ve got 150 gigabytes of photographs from just the first five months of this year … plus digital photos, and scanned images of old-fashioned film photographs going back 40 years. I don’t know if I really need 20 terabytes of storage today, but I easily imagine needing it and wanting it five years from now.

On the other hand, a lot of competent computer-users that I know (a) have no idea how much disk storage capacity they have, and (b) have actually used less than 10% of their capacity, much of it with system files and applications.

I suspect that businesses are the same way: the larger, ambitious, technology-savvy companies (and government agencies, too) are constantly pushing the boundaries of available storage capacity. If you need an example, just think about Google for a few minutes. On the other hand, there are also lots and lots of companies (and government agencies) that probably don’t really know or care how much disk (or RAM, or tape or whatever) storage they’re using, and don’t feel an urgent need for more.

Indeed, what do we need all of this storage capacity for? Well, here’s one important clue: the reason I could live fairly happily with a 10-megabyte hard disk in the early 1980s is that I was storing only text-based files. I’m a fairly prolific author, but 10 million bytes of storage is a lot of writing! Obviously, what has changed since then is the desire/need to store digital music, digital images, and video. And while we were once content to capture, store, and manipulate images consisting of 480-by-640 pixels, now we’re dealing with images that often require 10-15 megapixels each.

Throw in maps, satellite images, and a constant stream of still and video images from hundreds (maybe thousands) of security cameras all around us, and it’s not too difficult to see the possibility that we’ll continue using up the increased storage capacity brought to us by the wonders of Moore’s Law … at least for another 5-10 years. If we decide that we want our video cameras to capture not just 10 frames per second, but 100 frames, or even 1,000 frames per second, that will require even more storage. (Why we would want 1,000 frames per second for anything other than a few specialized applications is beyond my ability to comprehend, but that may simply reflect a lack of imagination on my part.)

If we eventually reach the point where we have no more music, graphic, or video data to record, what else require massive amounts of storage? There are probably several answers to that question, but here’s one possibility: biometric data. If we could monitor, record, and manipulate all of the data associated with each heart-beat, each breath we take, each hiccup and burp, each movement of major muscles, each twitch of an eye, each … well, you get the picture. There is an enormous amount of data that we could record about every human on this planet, from the moment we’re born until the moment we die.

There are three important consequences of such a scenario — i.e., the scenario where we’re storing 10 times, or 100 times, as much data as we already store:

• Data mining will become increasingly important, because patterns and trends will be more important than the individual data items themselves. Well, some data items may be extremely important (e.g., the heartbeats shortly before and after a heart attack, or the video images captured by a security camera just before and after a terrorist incident), but the vast majority of the data elements will be mundane, boring, and ultimately irrelevant.
• Data analysis will also become important, which in turn will place a greater emphasis on the CPU “horsepower” needed to analyze, manipulate, and “crunch” all of the data we record and store.
• Data visualization will become more important, too. Good data mining might help us extract the tiny subset of data that we really do want to look at; but we’re also going to need new ways to visually absorb and digest massive amounts of potentially relevant data. The work of people like Edward Tufte will gain even more respect; and the work of innovative groups like Digg Labs (you’ve got to check out their work!) will also gain more attention.

Bottom line: storage capacity is likely to benefit as much from Moore’s Law as the related “dimensions” of cost, speed/power, and size/footprint. Exactly what we’ll do with vastly greater storage capacity isn’t completely clear, but I’m confident that it will help us use computers in qualitatively different ways 5-10 years from now.

We’ve certainly seen ample evidence of this trend during the past several decades. Relatively primitive computing machines (by today’s standards) once filled vast rooms, which had to be cooled with massive refrigeration units to keep the machines from overheating. I remember being in one such computer room, back in the mid-sixties, with a storage device known as a “high speed drum” (roughly akin to today’s hard disks, but by no means the same thing) that had a capacity of three megabytes. (Not gigabytes or terabytes, but just a few measly megabytes). The device was about the size of a family-sized washing machine, and it made just about as much noise; the scary thing, though, was that the bolts that anchored it to the floor suddenly snapped, and the drum began vibrating its way across the computer-room floor…

Well, from those ancient days, we went to refrigerator-sized minicomputers, and then desktop computers the size of a pizza box, and laptop computers the size of a notebook. Today, we’ve got smartphones that fit in our pockets; and we’ve got special-purpose computing devices the size of a postage stamp, if not smaller. So, 5-10 years from now, we’ll have … what?

Futurist Ray Kurzweil is not content to look ahead just 5-10 years. He says, “There will be a 100,000-fold shrinking of computer technology over the next 25 years.” (see “Microscopic computers may be managing human health by 2033“) Kurzweil goes on to argue that even today, we can put a pea-sized computer inside someone’s brain, ostensibly to replace the biological neurons destroyed by diseases like Parkinson’s. So perhaps in the next decade or so, we’ll see what he refers to as “blood cell-size devices … that can go inside our bodies and keep us healthy, and inside our brain and expand our intelligence.”

While such visions of the future may be reasonable in terms of just the size of the computing devices, I have no idea whether the field of biology will be able to take advantage of such “bionic” devices. But it certainly does create a great deal of incentive for such research to take place, and I’m optimistic that even if we don’t soon achieve the “bionic man” that we used to watch on science-fiction TV shows, we’ll definitely see some important improvements. Tiny embedded devices, for example, could arguably be used to augment physical sensations such as eyesight (for the near-sighted) or hearing (for people slowly becoming deaf) or smell or touch.

And as a complement or alternative to embedding devices inside the human body, we can easily imagine miniaturized computing devices being embedded into our clothing — e.g., in our shoes, our glasses, our shirts and dresses, even our underwear. Relatively primitive versions of such devices — sometimes known as “wearable computers” — have been discussed in the literature for at least ten years; see, for example, a 1997 paper titled “Smart Clothing: The ‘Wearable Computer’ and Wear Cam,” and a more recent (January 2010) report on “Computer Clothing.”

Assuming that such technology can be produced and sold at an economical price, it’s easy to imagine that while older generations of people might be terrified at the thought of computers inside their bodies — while younger generations might be more willing to accept the notion of computerized gadgets making them healthier, skinnier (what about microcomputers that gobble up fat cells?), and that help restore damaged or deteriorating physical capabilities.

Being healthy is important, and quite a few people obsess about it (we eat too much, but we also spend billions on diet pills and low-carb foods). But being slender, attractive, and sexy is even more enticing, and probably easier to sell. Wearing computer-enhanced clothing might also be easy to sell, if it can be made to seem “fashionable.” All of which suggests that companies like Microsoft might have a hard time making a successful product in this area, while companies like Apple might do much better.

There’s one other aspect of the likely trend towards miniaturization that we need to discuss: the impact on user interfaces (UI). Again, it’s something we’ve already begun to see, as computers have shrunk from mainframes to minis to PC’s to smartphones in the past decades. Keyboards have gotten progressively smaller; “tactile” keyboards are being replaced by “virtual” keyboards on a screen; and in more and more cases, keyboard-based input/output is disappearing completely. Sometimes the UI is simpler because our “tiny” computers are specialized, single-function devices rather than general-purpose computers; for example, we don’t expect to see 200,000 apps on our iPod shuffle, and all we really need is a button to start and stop the device.

We seem to be in the era of touch-sensitive UI’s now, and everyone is fascinated with Apple’s “multi-finger” combinations of swipes, flicks, pinching, and expanding. That may be okay for a while, and it might even last for a long time with certain applications (look how long the keyboard and mouse have lasted!), but as our computing devices continue to shrink, we’ll need something else. Voice recognition, which has long been a source of amusement and scorn, could become the next “big thing,” as we look for ways to communicate with tiny devices. Perhaps we’ll find applications where the computing device can track the motion of a user’s eye, or various other body characteristics (perspiration, body temperature, etc.)

Or maybe we’ll see progress in a different direction: instead of a computer that says, “Please tell me, in detail, what you want me to do,” the computers of the future will say something like, “From my analysis of you and the current situation, I think it’s likely that you want me to do one of the following five things. Please tap (or nod, or gesture, or sneeze) to indicate whether you want me to do A, B, C, D, or E.”

I think we’re still quite a few years away from the world of self-sustaining, self-reproducing “intelligent” nanoparticles that Michael Crichton described in his 2002 science fiction novel, Prey. But that might well just mean that it’s 20 years away, rather than only 5 or 10 years away…

• Disposable computers
• Multiple computer gadgets for everyone, not just one
• Shift in power, as scarce technology becomes a commodity

Cheap Computers Means Disposable Computers

When I bought a fully-equipped laptop for $4,000 several years ago, I treated it like a precious, delicate jewel. Now I can buy a run-of-the-mill laptop, or an entry-level iPad, for about $500; at that price, I can afford to be a little more cavalier about it. If it cost only $50, I wouldn’t throw it away after a day’s use, but I might buy two or three of them (as I’ll discuss below). But for $5, or for $0.50, the computer truly becomes disposable.

This is not such a radical idea. Toward the end of the film-based camera era, Kodak began promoting the notion of “disposable cameras” — perhaps because so many amateur photographers found it difficult to load a new roll of film into the older, traditional (expensive) cameras. Kodak’s new model came with pre-loaded film; and when you finished taking the 24 images, you brought the whole thing into the neighborhood photo shop — with the expectation that you would get 24 prints in a few days, but you would never see the camera again.

As for disposable computers, I have to admit that my imagination is somewhat limited. The first (and almost only) thing that comes to mind is computer chips embedded in the packaging that surrounds the products that we buy — products which themselves might be consumable, or disposable, but which would still benefit from, say, ongoing quality control for freshness and safety. Thus, when you buy a carton of FutureMilk, an embedded chip tells you if it’s still fresh; when you finish consuming the milk, you toss the empty carton in the trash. Same thing with cans or bottles of FutureCoke and FutureBeer, boxes of FutureCereal, and bags of FutureTacoChips.

I think we’re also likely to see more “smart” devices that retrieve, store, and manipulate data about our day-to-day lives, as well as interacting with us in some useful way — but which have a limited, short-term “life span,” after which we expect them to “die” without making all of its accumulated data available to anyone else. We already have primitive versions of this with plastic hotel room-keys, and metro-cards that we “fill up” with electronic funds, but ultimately throw away. I suspect we’ll have a lot more gadgets of this kind, even if I can enumerate a bunch of specific examples.

Multiple computer gadgets for everyone

I was a child of the 1950s, and I grew up in a typical middle-class American household. If you looked in my closet, you would have found one pair of shoes. If you asked why I didn’t have more than one pair, I probably would have said, “I only have one pair of feet. What would I do with the other ones?”

Today, I have a couple dozen pairs of shoes. I have black dress shoes, and brown dress shoes; and I have a couple more pairs of (black) dress shoes that have thicker soles, so I can stand all day long when I’m presenting lectures and seminars. I have walking shoes, jogging shoes, gym shoes, and casual “tennis” shoes (which I don’t use for playing tennis, but for walking on the beach, where they might get soaked by incoming waves). I have leather sandals, and Teva sandals, and two or three different pairs of flip flops. I sometimes wish that I could return to the simpler life of my childhood, where I didn’t have to think about which pair of shoes I would wear … but that’s not the world that Nike and Adidas and Ecco and various other manufacturers really want us to think about very much.

Similarly, it wasn’t all that long ago that I had only one desktop computer — and it was in the office. Then I got a desktop computer at home. Then I got a laptop. Then my wife wanted one. Then my kids wanted one…. and now I have a desktop (with two large display monitors), two laptops, an old Acer laptop for those rare occasions when I absolutely must operate in “pure” Windows mode. And that doesn’t count the iPad or the iPhone, or the Blackberry, or the three old Palm Pilots gathering dust in a desk drawer.

I don’t even think about this very much, but I remember visiting some friends a couple years ago, and expressing surprise that the whole family shared a single laptop computer.

“Why do you think they call it a personal computer?” I asked.

The parents looked at me blankly. (The kids weren’t around.)

“Well, sharing a personal computer is like sharing … well, like sharing a toothbrush!” I exclaimed.

“Yeah,” said one of the parents. “We do.”

I’m not really sure if they were pulling my leg, but I could see that we had no basis for a conversation. And I’ll bet that if I had looked in any of their closets, I would have found more than one pair of shoes.

In my middle-class childhood of the 1950s, we also had only one car, one telephone, one radio, and one television (which didn’t actually arrive in the household until after I had left for college). All of that sounds rather bizarre in today’s world, because most of these items have become affordable enough that we can take advantage of our natural desire — partly pragmatic, partly selfish, and partly driven by the power of Madison Avenue marketing — to have our personal car, telephone, radio, and/or television.

And just as we shrug at the notion of more than one pair of shoes per person, Moore’s Law will make us feel the same way about computing devices. Why do I have two laptops, for example? Well, one of them is the ultra-lightweight Mac Air, with relatively limited power and storage; and the other is a heavier, 17-inch Mac Powerbook Pro, with the fastest processor and largest disk I could find. They serve different purposes, and I use them both.

Remember, also, that we have a number of other “gadgets” that are almost entirely dependent on embedded computer technology. I have five different digital cameras, which doesn’t even count the Blackberry camera (which I haven’t bothered figuring out), or the three obsolete cameras that gather dust on a shelf in my office, but which are still quite capable of taking excellent photos.

I justify the proliferation of these devices by the significant differences in features and functions they provide. But if you were to drop the price by another tenfold or hundred-fold — if, for example, I could buy a top-of-the-line digital camera for $10 — then fashion would come into play. I might want to take my red camera with me on certain days of the week, the green camera on other days, the blue camera on the weekends, and the old-fashioned black camera for “serious” occasions. If my clothes reflected an elegant, chic fashion style (which they don’t!), then I might want to have a dozen different laptops, so I could make sure that the one I took with me on any given day was color-coordinated with my clothes.

Shift in power

To help you appreciate how much things have changed, let me tell you a little about what the “business world” was like when I first graduated from college and began working in a reasonably successful, high-tech computer company. If we wanted to make copies of a paper document, we first had to get approval from a secretary; and then we carried the original piece of paper to the Photocopying Department. It wasn’t called the “xerox room,” and mere mortals like me were not allowed to operated them on our own.

Similarly, if I wanted to make a local phone call from my office, I could pick up the phone on my desk. But if I wanted to make a business call to, say, our office in California, I had to get that approved, too. And then I took the (approved) request to a switchboard operator and scheduled the phone call — usually a day or so in advance. It’s not just that we lacked touch-tone phones, direct-dialing, or area codes; we lacked the authority to use what was then an extremely scarce resource.

Roughly ten years later, I had a software consulting firm with roughly a hundred employees, headquartered in New York. We had a telephone sales department, plus a bunch of other people who had legitimate business reasons for calling clients and co-workers and business partners all over the country. We also had a few employees who snuck into the office at night and called their girl-friend in Puerto Rico, or their mother in Europe. So when we got the monthly phone bill — which was typically on the other of $20,000 — we went over every itemized call to ensure that (a) our employees weren’t misusing a resource that still fairly scarce and expensive, and (b) the phone company wasn’t overcharging us for all of those long-distance calls.

Obviously, the same thing was true with access to computers. Many of today’s IT professionals have no living memory of the days when mainframe computers were locked in sterilized rooms, and batch jobs had to be submitted well in advance — with appropriate approvals and authorizations if those jobs required more than a minimal amount of computing resources.

Intellectually, we all know that access to computing has changed dramatically: we’ve evolved from the days of the mainframe, to the PC, then to the laptop, and now to the mobile smartphone. But if you look at the politics and the “power structure” in many large organizations today, there is still a strong tendency to control access to the computing power that’s available for almost no cost at all. It may come from senior management, or it may come from the IT department. It may be justified by “security,” or government regulations that were written 20 years ago. Or it might be justified simply by the stern message, “We can’t afford to waste precious corporate resources.”

Ironically, we don’t even have to respond to these arguments, threats, and ultimatums (ultimati?) any more … because computing power is so affordable that we no longer depend on our employer. We can buy our own, and to a significant degree, we can decide for ourselves how to use it. You can impose all kinds of restrictions and controls on my use of “corporate” computing resources, but when I walk out the door at the end of the day, I take my iPhone with me. I carry my personal laptop in my backpack, and I go home to my personal desktop, where I access the Internet via my personal service provider, and get my personal e-mail from Google or Yahoo or AOL or any one of a dozen other providers.

And the power shift has just begun: as Moore’s Law makes computing more and more affordable, especially to people in developing countries around the world, the shift will accelerate.

It’s important to note that we might not always see this phenomenon taking place — at least, not necessarily in the short term. If we acquire computer-based technological gadgets from a monopolistic supplier, or an oligopoly capable of price-fixing, then we could find ourselves paying the same price for our gadgets, even though the manufacturer’s costs were steadily dropping in Moore’s-like fashion.

Or we could find, as is so often the case with our home PC’s, that the new products that we’re offered each year cost more-or-less the same as last year’s model … but it’s twice as fast, or has twice as much disk storage. This is particularly likely to be the case if the manufacturer has managed to get the price of its product down to a psychological threshold like, say, $500.

But in the long run, these are exceptions. The fact of the matter is that I have computing power on my desktop that would have cost millions, or even tens of millions, of dollars when I started my career in the computer field. There’s more computing power in my super-cheap digital wristwatch than there was in the minicomputer on which I laboriously coded a FORTRAN math library for DEC in the good old days. And the list goes on …

Okay, so what does this mean — in terms of how we might expect to use computer technology in the future? I think there will be four main consequences:

• ubiquitous computing
• disposable computers
• multiple computer-driven gadgets per person, rather than just one
• shifts in power/control, as scarce items become commodities

I’ll discuss ubiquitous computing in today’s blog, and will move on to the other aspects of cheaper computers in the next couple of days.

Ubiquitous Computing

If the cost of computer technology does continue to drop, then we shouldould expect to see cheaper prices in the marketplace, and thus a much larger potential market for computer-based products. And there’s a related benefit — economies of scale, with mass production of millions of units — that I don’t really know how to quantify. But it ultimately leads to a phenomenon often described as ubiquitous computing — i.e., everyone has a computer.

To some extent, we’re not too far away from that phenomenon, even today. In 2008, the Gartner research firm estimated that the number of installed PCs worldwide had passed 1 billion units, and that it would reach 2 billion by 2014 (see “Gartner Says More than 1 Billion PCs In Use Worldwide and Headed to 2 Billion Units by 2014“). In a slightly more conservative estimate, the Forrester analyst firm estimated in 2009 that the worldwide installed base would hit 1 billion by the end of 2010, and that it will rise to 2 billion by 2015 (see “PC numbers set to hit 1 billion: and 2 billion mark in sight by 2015“). Obviously, that’s not everyone in the world; but it does suggest that one out of three people in the world will have a laptop or desktop within five years.

For those of us in the advanced/developed countries, it’s easy to imagine this trend continuing, for we continue to see computers in our neighborhood electronics/appliance stores for more and more affordable prices — e.g., prices that drop from $2,000 to $1,000 and now down to $500 or even $300. A more ambitious project is known variously as the “hundred dollar laptop” or the “One Laptop Per Child” (OLPC) project, hopes to persuade governments of developing nations around the world to buy hundreds of thousands of these inexpensive general-purpose laptop computers, so that every school-age child can indeed have one for his or her own. As of last year, the purchase price of the OLPC computer was actually closer to $188; but a 2nd-generation machine is scheduled to be released sometime later in 2010, with a price reduction down to $75 (along with a reduction in power consumption from 4 watts to one watt!).

Meanwhile, more and more people are suggesting that laptops/desktops may not be the platform of choice in the future. It might be a netbook/iPad device, or, more likely perhaps, a smartphone. Indeed, even an old-fashioned mobile phone like the Motorola Razr or some of the early Nokia products, could be considered computing devices. And while it’s estimated that there were only 11.2 million cellphones, worldwide, back in 1980, the number grew to one billion in 2002, 2.4 billion in 2006, 3 billion in late 2007, and 4.1 billion in early 2009 (see “Cell Phones and Globalization” and “Nice talking to you … mobile phone use passes milestone” or the sources of these estimates). That’s somewhat more than half of the global population — and while we may never reach the level of 100% market saturation, it’s not unreasonable to imagine that we’ll reach the 90% level within the next 5-10 years.

Of course, the “ultimate” limit in cost reduction is zero — i.e., free computing devices. We already have numerous examples of free information (e.g., Wikipedia), free software (open-source software, and most of the tools and apps from the Web 2.0 community), and many people may believe that their mobile phones are free. But there are at least two well-known business models that make these two examples possible. One such model, which we see primarily with free software is the advertising-based approach, where consumers are subjected to commercial advertisements. The other common model, exemplified by the mobile-phone example, is one in which the “razor” is free, but the “razor blades” cost money.

One last point before I wrap up today’s blog: even if a computing device is free, or even if it has a modest cost of a dollar, it’s likely to be used for entirely different purposes by a poor customer in a developing nation, than it will be used by a middle-class or prosperous customer in an advanced/developed nation. The region where mobile-phone usage is growing the fastest, for example, is Africa. But you’re likely to see much more usage in Africa, India, and other such regions for health-care issues and “basic” economic issues than, say, the U.S. market — where, for example, a predominant percentage of the iPhone apps are games, or some form of entertainment and amusement.