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Wednesday October 12, 2005

Things are getting interesting again...

IT hasn't had much to excite joe public in the last couple of years. The browser wars are ancient history, the millenium came without major incident (big round of applause for the much abused IT sector for that - well done people!) and the dot com bubble burst, leaving a few casualties, but contrary to the doom mongers, the internet is still there and e-commerce is bigger than ever...

But where is what we in the UK call, the 'whizz bang' factor?

I think it's coming. Have a look around. You've got people like George Colony, CEO at Forrester saying stuff like "Microsoft is in its most vulnerable moment in history, just like IBM in the 1990s ." That's interesting. Why is that then?

Big threats from open-source and Linux (Yawn, heard that before), big threats from Mozilla (Firefox browser is great, but not exactly life changing lets be honest), big threats from Apple (can anyone say ITunes?)... all cool, but nothing really new there.

What's more interesting is what's happening with the likes of Google, Ebay, Yahoo etc. Our software chief, Jonathon Schwartz (his blog) recently asked one of his audiences the following...

[I] ask[ed] the audience which they'd rather give up - their browser, or all the rest of their desktop apps. (Unanimously, they'd all give up the latter without a blink.)

Speaks volumes that does ;-)

Imagine a world where we can do everything through the browser, office productivity, email, media, collaboration... then imagine the capability of plugging ebay into googleearth, salesforce.com into fedextrack as bespoke 'applications on demand', no need to install, just drag 'n' drop the connections in your browser.

I ran this idea past one of my friends this morning at Starbucks, who in his own words is "a bit of microsofty" who said it would never work, that people wouldn't trust an online system with this kind of data. "You'd never make it secure, and people wouldn't trust it."

I'd argue that 308,000 subscribers trusting their CRM data to salesforce.com and $65M revenue to salesforce.com last quarter as a result says he's wrong. Salesforce.com calls itself the 'Ebay for business software'

Apparently, 10% of software budgets are blown on 'on-demand' software today. That's higher than I suspected and is worth £4B today. It's forecast to grow to $10B in 2009 (I reckon that's pessimistic)

My friend said he wanted the option to have his computer disconnected from the network and still be able to do things. I asked him whether or not he wanted to be able to disconnect his house from the mains every so often so he could have fun running his own diesel generator. Ok, a bit flippant, but the point still stands.

The big objection to utility computing is it's not reliable and it's not secure, but how often to you really worry about power outages and weird chemicals in your water supply? You don't, they just work - pretty much. I don't have to know about line voltage, impediance, salinity, ionic catalysts; I just plug in, switch on, turn the tap and down a glass....and pay my monthly bill. My point is these networks are mature, computing isn't yet, but it will be!

What would you need for this brave new world? A basic OS with network and media capability, a reliable broadband connection, a trusted browser, some neat GUI enhancements for that browser, a programming language that works anywhere, loads of online services, storage, security, identity and web services support. No wonder chairs are flying at Microsoft.

Can anyone say 'Sun Microsystems'?

Oh yes, things are getting interesting again!

( Oct 12 2005, 12:30:35 PM BST / Oct 12 2005, 10:25:36 AM BST ) Permalink Comments [0]
Trackback: http://blogs.sun.com/Drew/entry/things_are_getting_interesting_again

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