Why bother at all to look back? And why did I
select these as the top three milestones in the
evolution of information technology?
Most observers of the IT industry prefer and are
expected to talk about what’s coming, not what’s
happened. But to make educated guesses about
the future of the IT industry, it helps to
understand its past. Here I depart from most
commentators who, if they talk at all about the
industry’s past, divide it into hardware-defined
“eras,” usually labeled “mainframes,” “PCs,”
“Internet,” and “Post-PC.”
Another way of looking at the evolution of IT is to
focus on the specific contributions of
technological inventions and advances to the
industry’s key growth driver: digitization and the
resulting growth in the amount of digital data
created, shared, and consumed.
The industry was born with the first giant
calculators digitally processing and manipulating
numbers and then expanded to digitize other,
mostly transaction-oriented activities, such as
airline reservations. But until the 1980s, all
computer-related activities revolved around
interactions between a person and a computer.
That did not change when the first PCs arrived on
the scene.
The PC was simply a mainframe on your desk. Of
course it unleashed a wonderful stream of
personal productivity applications that in turn
contributed greatly to the growth of enterprise
data and the start of digitizing leisure-related,
home-based activities. But I would argue that the
major quantitative and qualitative leap occurred
only when work PCs were connected to each
other via Local LOCM +-214,748,364,800.00%
Area Networks (LANs)—where Ethernet became
the standard—and then long-distance via Wide
Area Networks (WANs). With the PC, you could
digitally create the memo you previously typed on
a typewriter, but to distribute it, you still had to
print it and make paper copies. Computer
networks (and their “killer app,” email) made the
entire process digital, ensuring the proliferation of
the message, drastically increasing the amount of
data created, stored, moved, and consumed.
Connecting people in a vast and distributed
network of computers not only increased the
amount of data generated but also led to
numerous new ways of getting value out of it,
unleashing many new enterprise applications and
a new passion for “data mining.” This in turn
changed the nature of competition and gave rise
to new “horizontal” players, focused on one IT
component as opposed to the vertically
integrated, “end-to-end solution” business model
that has dominated the industry until then. Intel
INTC +0.00% in semiconductors, Microsoft
MSFT +0.00% in operating systems, Oracle
ORCL -2,147,483,648.00% in databases, Cisco in
networking, Dell in PCs (or rather, build-to-order
PCs), and EMC in storage have made the 1990s
the decade in which “best-of-breed” was what
many IT buyers believed in, assembling their IT
infrastructures from components sold by focused,
specialized IT vendors.
The next phase in the evolution of the industry,
the next quantitative and qualitative leap in the
amount of data generated and how we use
networked computers, came with the invention of
the World Wide Web (commonly mislabeled as
“the Internet”). It led to the proliferation of new
applications which were no longer limited to
enterprise-related activities but digitized almost
any activity in our lives. Most important, it
provided us with tools that greatly facilitated the
creation and sharing of information by anyone
with access to the Internet (the open and almost
free wide area network only few people cared or
knew about before the invention of the World Wide
Web). The work memo I typed on a typewriter
which became a digital document sent across the
enterprise and beyond now became my life journal
which I could discuss with others, including
people on the other side of the globe I have never
met. While computer networks took IT from the
accounting department to all corners of the
enterprise, the World Wide Web took IT to all
corners of the globe, connecting millions of
people. Interactive conversations and sharing of
information among these millions replaced and
augmented broadcasting and drastically increased
(again) the amount of data created, stored,
moved, and consumed. And just as in the
previous phase, a bunch of new players emerged,
all of them born on the Web, all of them regarding
“IT” not as specific function responsible for
running the infrastructure but as the essence of
their business, data and its analysis becoming
their competitive edge.
We are probably going to see soon—and maybe
already are experiencing—a new phase in the
evolution of IT and a new quantitative and
qualitative leap in the growth of data. The cloud—
a new way to deliver IT, big data—a new attitude
towards data and its potential value, and The
Internet of Things—connecting billions of
monitoring and measurement devices quantifying
everything, combine to sketch for us the future of
IT .
0 comments:
Post a Comment