Versatile Amphibian

I hear a lot of talk in the market about the challenge of format proliferation in streaming video delivery. The thinking goes that the number of devices that can stream video - phones, TVs, set top boxes - is growing and so content distributors must transcode into an increasing number of formats to service them. This creates a mare's nest of connections and formats to service consumer demand. I wonder whether we should also consider another world, where devices increase in processing power and application platforms become standardised across categories of devices (e.g. Android on TVs). In this world, distribution becomes a trial of bandwidth at the edge and possibly also in the core and the devices shoulder the burden of making viewing a rich experience. A similar thing happened when the mobile web was young. Operators spent tens of millions on hardware and software to enable web pages to be viewed on phones. It didn't take long, however, for phones to gain the processing power...

Reading an article on Microsoft putting Office into the cloud brought ' Directions on Microsoft ' to my attention. I'm very used to the idea of analysis firms pointed at particular market segments, but had never encountered one aimed at a particular company. The more I thought about it, the more this made sense to me. It occurs that the market of today is akin to science at the turn of the 20th Century. There is so much to discover in so many fields that the traditional 'expert' commentators on a field cannot hope to see everything, let alone consider the resulting implications. This effect is becoming more marked as (particularly technology) companies continue their acquisition sprees, bringing many more divisions and products into their portfolios. Perhaps just as gentlemen astronomers provided great insights into the cosmos, small, pointed analysis firms can help us make sense of the hyper-dynamic, information-saturated market of the twenty-teens. Something else ...

I've just read the Pew Research Center's annual survey on cloud computing . As ever, it contains plenty of thought-provoking commentary from experts. One that really caught my attention was this quote from Nokia's Davis Fields: "It's 2010 and I could already basically use only cloud-based applications on my computer. Local storage is already increasingly irrelevant – I have my all my photos stored on Flickr, my address book is in my Gmail and I've got all my emails stored there as well. Apple will likely move iTunes online in the next few years, and streaming movies from Netflix will eliminate the need to download movie files. I use Microsoft Office and Photoshop out of familiarity as my main two desktop apps, but good alternatives already exist online. I predict most people will do their work on ‘screens connected to the web,’ There won't be any sort of ‘computer’ anymore." Now, I agree with the sentiment that every screen will be connected to the web...