What will 2020 look like in computing?
So Greg Papadopoulos posted a very interesting blog entry back on September 12th. I've always enjoyed his rambling style of writing and it has prompted me to add my thoughts, but on not on as a grand scale. I think I'll just postulate what I think 2020 will look, not 2050.
Working with ISVs I often get the same or similar question to, "What do you think is the next big thing on the horizon?". In today's post, I just want to focus on size and hardware.
Size Matters
I think hardware will continue to shrink and there will be a Dick Tracy age where computing devices are wearable. For this age to come, we do indeed need advancements on several fronts beyond size. The additional areas where we need significant improvements are weight, heat output and energy requirements. I was speaking at a conference recently and I visited the booth of a vendor looking to sell solutions into the hospitality industry. They were looking to sell Ultra-Mobile PCs running their custom built application suite, but they were experiencing resistance due to the heat output and weight of the devices. The software was very compelling as a solution to real problems, but the human factors related to carrying the device for an extended period of time were inhibiting sales.
When I asked them about sizing down to a smaller device the issues then turned to the amount of time to develop device drivers and application code. While we do have very small Virtual Machines on the market today, they are so scaled down to minimize footprint that building compelling solutions can take an extended amount of time to produce, effectively moving costs to software development.
How do we get there
I think we need to get to a point where we begin to embed more of the operating system into the silicon and move to solid state hard drives. I'm moving into territory where my two electrical engineering courses in college won't suffice for me to be an expert, but I'm a pretty good armchair quarterback. We need to move out of the current form factors if we want to achieve portability and improve the interactions between humans and computers. By doing this we can begin to discover newer form factors for computing devices. Imagine under clothes that monitor a child's health through changes in body temperature and perspiration with the main computing device sewn directly into the clothing. Or think about a pill which once digested can not only take samples of your body's interior, but take pictures and report feedback real-time as it travels through your digestive system before being either absorbed by your body or excreted when no longer needed.
In addition to reducing size, there are security benefits to having the operating system exist in a primary read-only environment. We've seen moderate forays into this area with network computers and devices like the Wireless Hub/Router sitting in your home. When was the last time your wireless hub was hacked into?
Are there signs we're moving in that direction?
I think so, this past year we did announce our UMPC initiative. We now have operating systems doing some cool stuff in watches today, but the greatest hurdle is the sheer cost of developing next generation computing devices. For every success like PALM's Pilot or Apple's Ipod, you have dozens of companies that spent hundreds of millions of dollars only to fail. Economics are not exactly working in our favor, however, the pay-off for success is immense.
