The Future Of Technology
In some
sectors all is gloom and doom.
1000
(High Tech) Companies Will Fail
For
example, speaking at a recent conference, and covered in the Wall
Street Journal on April 8, Larry Ellison predicted that the
Silicon Valley would never again be as we knew it and that a
mature high tech industry was at the end of its growth.
Ellison (famous for making predictions that turn out to be
wrong) is sure that between commodity priced standard hardware and
open source software, the high tech business just can’t bring in
any more big payoffs.
Even so,
he’s singing many of the same songs that you’ll hear from the
Reducing Complexity Quartet (see below).
He’s very much in favor of simplicity, using available,
standard hardware and software, and taking advantage of the
outsourcing model.
Gee,
maybe Oracle is doing the right things, but it just can’t figure
out where to put its vision?
Tech Stocks To Fall Into A Long-Term Black
Hole
In the
meantime, UBS Warburg (a global investment banking and securities
firm), claims it sees no new or emerging technologies in the next
three or four years. Warburg
believes that only disruptive technologies have the potential to
generate big breakthroughs and drive new revenue.
The existing high tech industry is not, they believe,
likely to rise to the occasion and they rate only a few companies
as likely to make the transition.
They mention Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Dell, Intel, Samsung
and Nokia as “potentially having the cultural strength to adapt
to the "tectonic secular shift from exceptionally high growth
to low growth."
No wonder
surveys like the CIO one we report on in this issue show little
interest in growing their investment in IT.
That’s because the industry (and some of its pundits) are
looking in the wrong place – the past.
While it
is true that those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it,
it is also true that it’s hard to predict something you have no
experience of by looking in the past.
Historic trends can tell you WHEN something is likely to
happen but not WHERE or WHAT.
There
Is A Next Wave In Technology And It Is Arriving
So it is with great good cheer that we look at the investments
many vendors are making in reducing complexity, particularly those
who are coupling their substantial investments in neural networks,
artificial intelligence, and other advanced computing fields, with
new business concepts in how to offer computing to customers.
You are
familiar with the idea that technology arrives in waves, with
demand starting slowly, rising quickly, and then flattening out as
it matures. The
economy, the misstep of the dot.com bust, and the uncertainty of
global terrorism have together perhaps prevented what naturally
occurs – one long wave overlapping another, so that we are
already gliding up the slope of the next wave as the preceding one
flattens. But that is
a delay, not a disaster. The
wave is there and it’s coming.
So the
next wave of Reduced Complexity will arrive.
(Actually, it’s already here, in its early stages.)
I believe it will be combined with the new and
complimentary ideas of on-demand and utility computing and the
important notion that it is not necessary for every customer to
have internal deep expertise in computing in order to take
advantage of modern technology.
For some applications and some users, renting expertise and
technology will be the right approach, particularly when that
“rental” can be made highly granular and timely.
We are
continuing to do research across the major vendor offerings in
Autonomic (IBM) and Adaptive (HP) Computing as well as Sun’s N1
and Microsoft’s Dynamic Systems Initiative.
Soon we will offer you roadmaps and cross-vendor
comparisons – and our attempt to sort this out.
In the
meantime, we urge you to stop taking the short-term view of
today’s stock market’s ups and downs and instead to take the
long-term view of your business goals and how this new technology
opportunity will help you get there.
If reducing complexity frees up dollars spent on
maintaining existing systems today for investing in innovation,
tomorrow could be much more interesting.
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