Beyond | IT : Future

Video – Zune on Windows Mobile 7 vs. The Greater Sum

john.mullinax — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 20:17:50 GMT

Just saw this fun video from a post over at Live Side… funny thing, they hone in on whether or not one of the device interfaces is a preview of Windows Mobile 7 with a Zune app. To me, the the far more interesting thing is the qualitatively new, boundary-spanning experience they paint using technologies that are here (or almost here) today.

Take, for example, the guy playing a video game, getting pinged with an IM (XBOX Live and ties in Messenger contacts), and then using touch UI (coming in Windows 7) to switch over to a rich graphical interface (either WPF or Silverlight 3 running out-of-browser) monitoring his cloud app presumably hosted on Windows Azure (available now in CTP, with monitoring APIs), and using the UI to literally “dial up” the capacity for his app.

One place the video doesn’t go far enough… I’ll be surprised if someone in the future has to go in and manually turn up the capacity. Ok, maybe in the first release. But I think the direction of the thinking is that you will define rules that automagically keep response time under a certain threshold, up to a specific cost point… and then enforce new rules if the cost point is crossed. For example, “maintain less than 3 second response time, up to $500/month, and then keep a 4 second response time up to $1000/month”.

Of course, if the guy doesn’t get interrupted during his video game, then you don’t get to show the cool touch UI or capacity dial. :)

Video: Overnight Success

See more “vision” videos and info here.

Technorati Tags: software-plus-services,vision,video,windows azure,windows live,WPF,future

The Next Next Next Big Thing

john.mullinax — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 16:02:45 GMT

Stephen Elop is an interesting guy. He’s President of Microsoft’s Business Division, but he’s also been a leader at Juniper, Lotus, Macromedia, and Adobe. He spoke recently to Wharton students about the future of business technology.

Most of his presentation was organized around an “envisioning video”. First, he sets the stage for the video with some context on demographic and economic trends, and how Microsoft thinks about R&D investment during the current period of economic uncertainty (hint: now more than ever).

Then he shows the video – itself only about 5 minutes. Now, I’ve seen this particular envisioning video in the past, as well as others like it. It’s fun to notice bits and pieces of the imagined future experiences, and try to connect them back to some of today’s technologies.

But Stephen did something in his Wharton presentation that I hadn’t seen before: he spends 15 minutes or so walking through each of the scenes from the video – which appear very futuristic and far away – discussing some specific, very real technologies people are working on today to bring the vision in the video to life.

Definitely worth a look. If you want to skip the context setting and jump straight to the video, it starts about the 14:00 minute mark.

Technorati Tags: future,microsoft,technology

The purpose of Chrome, and how it may be good for Microsoft

john.mullinax — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 21:43:00 GMT

Started this as a comment on Larry Digan's blog here, but it ended up so darn long I decided to make it a post on its own right here. A few more thoughts on Chrome. Just my 2 cents. -John

...

More than anything else, Chrome strikes me as a "trojan horse" of sorts to get Google Gears installed on people's computers. Mozilla is already out there for users... the most notable thing about Chrome is that the download forces an install of the Google Gears software alongside the ~~Mozilla/Gecko~~ Webkit rendering engine.

Why would Google do this? Because they realize that marrying installed desktop software and internet content could help them create new kinds of experiences to drive additional usage for their apps by consumers and possibly businesses. Ultimately, the goal is more revenue.

What I find interesting is that this is a very similar to Adobe's vision for computing experiences, as AIR illustrates. At a high level, it's also similar to Microsoft's "Software-plus-Services vision" for computing, that basically says that the web platform and all the other software platforms should work well together.

As a side note, it's interesting that Google is not just copying Microsoft's (and Adobe's) basic strategy here, they are actually copying specific IE features for Chrome... e.g., separate tabs in seperate processes, private browsing (Chrome is limited here -- no cookie blocking, I believe), phishing protection, etc. were released first as IE 8 features (or IE7 in the case of phishing protection).

There are differences, of course, as Google and Microsoft are approaching a similar vision from very different places. Google has been a strong search provider, but may still be learning how to be a software company, with on-premise software products and a software ecosystem to support. Google's ability to execute their flavor of the deployed software + internet services strategy requires getting new apps built to meet all the various computing needs out there with a browser/Gears-based solution. A tall order that will take time - particularly if you think about the business computing market that Google hopes to break into.

For it's part, Microsoft has a great deal of software deployed in the ecosystem, as well a a raft of internet services -- some strong and well-established, some still emerging. For example, think of Mesh and the Windows Live stuff like Messenger, identity, email, contacts, video streaming, etc.). Also, think of new rich, internet-connected smart client capabilities in .NET that lets businesses and partners create superior new experiences, and think of how Office suite itself has become an internet aware platform (one example: FedEx QuickShip lets you ship over the internet from Outlook). Finally, think about how Microsoft is providing choice of deployment models in some of it's "traditional"... software -- letting people choose on premise or cloud hosting (e.g, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, CRM Online, for mid-market and larger businesses and Office Live for small businesses and individuals). So that's a lot of stuff... and that's the point: in its offerings for both consumers and businesses, Microsoft is combining the power of the internet with the capabilities of software, and doing it across many devices... and in some cases even across platforms.

And very importantly, Microsoft is going down this path with an industry-leading respect for privacy that puts users in control of their data.

So given the similarities in high level strategies, the interesting question isn't who's got the "right" uber-strategy, it's who can most effectively empower users across a broad range of computing needs (that today includes a range of legacy computing environments) with better experiences?

For this reason, I think Chrome may actually help Microsoft. Although multiple companies share a vision for computing that includes the internet and deployed software working well together, it is a change in mindset for consumers and businesses alike. Google's efforts with Chrome should help educate the marketplace about the value of supplementing browser-only experiences with internet-connected software.
That's good for Microsoft, because I believe their flavor of the "Software-plus-Services vision is simultaneously the broadest and the also the most pragmatic/approachable for users who want better experiences.

Technorati Tags: Software-plus-Services,Chrome,Google,Microsoft,strategy,future

How to Tap IT's Hidden Potential - WSJ.com

john.mullinax — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 21:55:19 GMT

Good article worth a few minutes here.

Likes: The article focuses in on the competitive necessity and opportunity to leverage technology to create value in your business It reads a bit like "IT Leadership 101", but sometimes what seems like common sense is not always common. The article has strong tones of "business and IT alignment" -- a drum that continues to be worth beating. And it highlights the importance of being able to make decisions the organization will be happy with. Most importantly, the article should get people thinking about how tap "the hidden potential" of IT -- a good thing regardless of whether you agree or disagree with the authors' specific ideas.

Dislikes: In a way, the article is perhaps too focused on business-IT alignment -- the "wall that separates the IT group from the rest of the business" -- ignoring other issues like misalignment between possibly wise goals and inability to execute, and financial and accounting practices that lead "business" and "IT" to jointly make decisions without realizing the extent to which those decisions may be sub-optimal.

In other ways, the article doesn't go far enough. Computing is a bit like math -- it's integral to the success of every part of an organization. You would never design an organization where all mathematics were performed by a special group, and you had to call them to come in whenever math needed to be performed. Can you imagine? "I got two numbers here, let me call the math guy to come in and tell me what they add up to". Or, "I've got the list of customers we've reached, let me call the math guy to see if we hit our campaign goals." Or, "We're running 58 Jobs per Hour on our manufacturing line, and our goal is 60 JPH... let me call the math guy to see if we need to speed up or slow down." You get the idea: it's silly to think that people will not do math for themselves. We expect a certain amount of numeric literacy in personnel across all functions of the business. Increasingly, this will be true of computing as well.

Today, much of computing (not all) is a liberal art, and the bar on basic computer literacy keeps going up. I'm not suggesting abandoning IT as an organization and integrating all computing with various business functions, but I am suggesting that the level of integration should be flexible and that it will be expanding. It's not terribly important whether this is executed as a shift of IT personnel into other functions or if it's other functions doing more for themselves. The important things are the capabilities people are able to apply, one way or another. There was a time when the slightest change in a report was a programming effort. Then reporting tools came along that, once set up by IT, let business users create many of their own reports. There was a time when email, Internet browsers, Instant Messaging were not allowed at work. In many places, these tools have become indispensable.

As we move into the future, I expect the integration of technology into how we work, as well as the integration of IT into other parts of the organization, to continue along at least three important dimensions:

1. Expanding Productivity Environments. Things that we used to believe were special purpose applications continue to become part of our "productivity environments" -- e.g., the ability to create and modify reports, exchange messages, share video conferencing, etc. This trend is likely to continue to including things like easily bringing up and taking down analytical data marts, connecting to, creating, and modifying 3D visualizations, defining and executing complex business processes and workflows, etc. Things that 2 years ago required an IT development project will soon be achievable in a rich way without direct IT involvement beyond providing the tools, data sources, and training.

2. Self-Service Application Development. The trend toward "self-service" will also come to include development of applications. A few years ago few people outside of IT had ever heard of a web service or RSS -- these were the province of IT folks close to the leading edge. Today, web services and RSS are widely understood beyond IT -- at least at a conceptual level. And increasingly, the conceptual level will be enough because tools designed for non-IT users will abstract much of the implementation details away from users. Take a look at mashups -- including Popfly as a friendly environment to make and share mashups -- to see the direction things are going. To the extent this is a tool-enabled phenomenon, it's actually a sub-set of #1 -- I've listed it separately here because IT organizations have traditionally made their own distinction between managing the productivity environment and developing applications... so be prepared for some internal IT tension around this trend....

3. The Rise of Corporate Philosophers. Given the connotation of philosophers being people who don't do anything, this is probably the least flattering name I could have come up with, but I picked it for a reason. Ontology is essentially the study of how things in the world are related to each other ("the nature of being"), and it's classic metaphysics. We will continue to see increasing convergence in our physical and digital worlds, and that means being able to usefully represent more and more sophisticated ontologies. Defining these ontologies requires a deep understanding of the nature of being within a domain -- the kind of understanding that requires practitioner experience. Today this is often the realm of Information Architects within an IT organization, but moving forward the increasing complexity of ontologies will drive this capability closer to -- and probably inside of -- the various other business functions. Using marketing as an example (but the same is true for other business functions), in today's terms we would call people emerging in this role some kind of hybrid -- part IT and part marketing . Tomorrow, I think we'll just call them marketing people.

As I said, good article worth a few minutes.

How to Tap IT's Hidden Potential - WSJ.com

Technorati Tags: computing is a liberal art,convergence,decision making,Future,IT