Versatile Amphibian

I find myself consistently interested by the idea that for all the overt recent progress that we’ve experienced we are in fact in a lull, waiting for the next big thing to emerge. That’s made me think about the way in which the digital computing era has evolved over the last fifty years. This post sets out some thinking about how monopolies have formed and been broken in the Digital Economy to date as a precursor to further posts on future strategies and business models. Four great computing platforms The first Intel Microprocessor – the 4004 – was revealed to the world in November 1971. Although at the time few predicted its impact, the 4004 was the Big Bang event that launched the fifth great techno-economic revolution: the era of digital computing. Before the 4004 and the vast range of other microprocessors that followed it, computing power came at far too great a cost and complexity to be readily useful for the majority of everyday use cases. As we approach the fiftieth annive...

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...

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...

I attended a live video stream of the Future in Review conference on Wednesday. Although the format was unusual (even with a cinema screen and surround sound), several comments made by the speakers caught peeked my interest. During a conversation on the network implications of cloud services, it occured to me that the storage and processing of vast amounts of data in a central location is going to lead to significant latency problems. This in itself isn't great insight. Neither is the fact that network management is going to lead to distribution of content and processing around the edge of the network, based on statistical analysis of likely usage. I started wondering, however, whether that distribution is going to lead to 'systems' of usage, similar to the weather systems in the Earth's atmosphere. The Brownian motion of particles in the atmosphere is in some ways analagous to the 'motion' of packets in IP networks, with rate shaping and the variable speed of ...