After having ignored Web 2.0 and their facebooks and twitters of the world, I’ve finally decided to join the flock and take the leap with google+.
The main reason for this change of mind is really networking. I believe that in our globalized world this is the fastest, and easiest way to stay in touch with people around the world. Sure I give up privacy, but the perceived advantages outweighs the downside of careful use of this technology. I just have to keep reminding me that there’s no delete button on the internet.

Start.

When you work in the computer technology field, as I do, it is sometimes hard to see the groundbreaking changes, the computer world is undergoing, since you’re just too close. Constant change is what you experience at work every day, so the major technology shifts are sometimes hard to see with all the pieces flying around every day. But I’m convinced that we’re currently living through the beginning of groundbreaking changes that will forever change how we think about and use computers. The advent of low power CPU processors in non-PC devices, combined with broadband internet conections (wired and wireless),  GPS technology, the massive deployment of virtualization technologies with cloud computing and the uprise of new OS platforms like Android, Apple iPhone OS and linux in every new incarnations, the technology world will never be the same.
Sun(now Oracle), Microsoft, Intel, Cisco – they all live in the middle of this storm and are struggling to find their new roles in this changed world.
By the time we’ve pieced all the pieces together, we’ll live in a world that is submerged in technology. Not one, but many computing devices will surround the average city dweller in the western world. A couple of years ago this was called ubiquitous computing, but it has become more than that. The PC will build the backbone of this media rich, always on, always connected world. Data will migrate with people wherever they go. Interestingly this revolution isn’t brought upon us by big brother, but by the willing consumer who perceives benefits in using all this technology at the price of giving up of virtues perceived of lesser value – like privacy. Only time will tell if this is the right trade-off.
Technology is continuing to become commodetized. Yesterday’s Woot (www.woot.com) had an Android Tablet up for grabs for $80! HP today advertises its latest laptop computer with i3, 4GB RAM, 320GB HD, a 15.6″ screen and Windows 7 (64-bit) for $519.
Fivehundred dollars! Who is still making money at these price points? But in technology there’s no turning back. The only way to survive is to out innovate the competition – to get ahead of the storm front, get out into the clear and start setting the pace, instead of following the competition.
That’s one of the reasons why you see Intel still pushing MeGoo (I think soon to be gone), HP its Tablet with proprietary WebOS, and Microsoft its windows phone.
Agreeing to one platform would admit failure and leave the big players in one pond with the only differentiating factor being price – a battle nobody wants to fight for long. Instead everybody prefers to push their own standards for as long as they can – even at the risk of the bigger downside of loosing all of the investment. The potential rewards are tremendous – just ask Apple.
Until the dust settles on this batttle, brace for a lot of churn!

And the possibilities are literally endless: we’re only seeing the beginning of social networking on the internet, cars only start to get IP connections, air traffic control is shifting to new technology, databases slowly migrate to electronic forms (i.e. healthcare), and of course the regulatory system along with the governments are struggling to make sense of all the changes. In all this there are fortunes to be made and lost on the way.

Bill Gates, who was for some time the richest man in the world has made his fortune within 25 years. He wasn’t able to hold on very long to stay there (a Mexican telecom tycoon holds currently this title), but the next technology wave will produce the next wealth leader. The next Microsoft won’t be Microsoft – or Cisco, or Intel. The revolution continues and the pace is accelerating – sit back and enjoy – but don’t forget to breathe!

This is the first blog entry written from my brand-new Samsung Galaxy S on t-mobile.

I finally leapt into the next millennium and traded privacy for exciting new possibilities with the internet on the go.

I’d like to share some observations about inventions and innovations. Lots has been written about it, whole books and long essays. Having worked in the high tech industry myself for over ten years now I have my own observations. Many of today’s innovations in the technology field are more like linear extensions of once revolutionary ideas. This is not to discount the achievements of the newer developments, but just to describe the amount or pace of progression. If you think back to one of the  early microprocessor designs like the i4004 you’ll find that the development complexity was fairly manageable for a small team of engineers (think 20). The challenge was the unknown market that such a design would find a usage for. It was a contracted design for a commercial calculator at that time, but engineers at Intel realized that it could be utilized in different markets as well.

Future generations of the processor introduced new instructions, even new concepts of memory management and many other improvements. Over multiple generations the design grew from 8080 over 80186, the 8-286, the 80386 to the 80486, where it evolved from the P54 Pentium to an out-of-order design called the P6, or Pentium Pro. This design improved over various generations to the Pentium II Processor, and the Pentium III Processor, spawning the consumer segment Celeron Processor line on its way. All this happened while the complexity rose from generation to generation by a magnitude (the Pentium II processor contains ~11 million logic transistors (this excludes the transistors for the L2 cache)). While the 8080 design team comprised of a handful of engineers, the P6 team consisted of more than 600 engineers at peak time. This poses a significant management challenge to bring such a complex design to market,

The point here is that during all these years of significant x86 or IA-32 architecture improvements, the complexity and along with it the engineering cost of such an innovation was growing exponentially. The recovery of this cost was only possible by stable or growing profit margins, along with growing markets. Over all these years Intel was enjoying a highly profitable x86 business.

From generation to generation the complexity of the micro-architecture  grew significantly to provide a compelling solution to the PC market. This increase in complexity was significant and posed a significant market entry barrier for new competitors.

The next generations of P4 processors introduced a new level of complexity with their trace caches for instructions. The next generation Core 2 architecture  introduced a level of high performance multi threading architecture and the i7 with a completely new bus interface amongst many other changes. 

All these achievements required a magnitude higher development effort over their predecessors. These engineering challenges can only be met by large corporations that already have experience in managing large team, in many cases in a cross site setting.

Unless the market is disturbed by a non-linear development of some kind that is not predicted or embraced by established competitors (see: “The Innovator’s Dilemma”), this vicious cycle cannot be broken. Innovation is key to break out of this loop, although many failures will pave the way to break out. Innovation comes from the right idea at the right time. Should one of the two ingredients fall short, the whole endeavor is doomed. Many failed start-ups illustrate this painfully.

Examples of failures: video phone, tablet PC, net PC, 3D video, speech recognition, to name a few.

My point I’m trying to illustrate is that there a plenty of good ideas out there. But unless the timing is right for cost and market, you’ll be unable to build a business around it. Also, forecasting the future is actually rather simple as long as you’re assuming a linear progression of existing or known technologies. With disruptive technologies, these predictions become utterly useless. And nobody can predict if the time for a disruptive technology has come, unless someone tries.