All Posts in Technology

|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Imitation, I’m told, is the sincerest form of flattery. Given the occasional criticism of Gartner in this space over the years, I was especially flattered by Gartner Senior Analyst Nikos Drakos. At the Gartner Europe Spring Symposium/ITxpo 2001, Drakos made use of the technology life cycle — Hype, Disillusionment, Application — first described in this column back in May, 1996. Referring to peer-to-peer computing, Drakos reportedly said that it’s just approaching the top of the hype cycle, but after passing through the inevitable subsequent phase of disillusionment (which will take until 2004), peer-to-peer has great potential in the business environment.

Attribution would have been nice, but you can’t have everything. In any event, while the unattributed flattery was nice, Drakos’ prediction is both shaky and funny.

The funny part requires historical perspective. Remember the early days of client/server computing? Part of its attraction was its ability to move processing to the desktop. That way, as the number of end-users increased, so did the available computing power.

Our understanding was pretty fuzzy back then, of course. Distributed processing relates to the platform layer of technical architecture. Client/server is an application-layer issue, and may or may not relocate processing tasks. But that’s okay — a lot of people in IT are still pretty fuzzy about this distinction. Which explains at least some of the confusion connected to advocacy of what’s usually called “thin-client” (really, fat-network) computing architectures.

The logic behind fat network computing is the allegedly high cost of distributing applications to the desktop and managing them there. It “just makes sense” to centralize everything on bigger servers that are professionally managed in the data center, according to this line of thinking, although why it “just makes more sense” than taking advantage of desktop computing cycles to run the distributable parts of an application is rarely articulated.

Which is okay, because some thin-client architectures do run the distributable parts of an application on the desktop — they’re downloaded on-demand from a server in the form of Java applets. Or, the applets can load from a cache on the local hard drive, and are only downloaded when a new version is available on the server.

Which apparently is very different from Windows automatically downloading updated versions of DLLs when new versions are available on a server — that’s a fat-client technique. I guess the client is fat when software is installed instead of cached. It’s kind of hard to tell.

And it just got harder, because the very same pundits who explained why fat-network computing “just made sense” while client/server does not are now explaining that peer-to-peer computing is in your future. Why? Because it makes use of all that wasted computing power available on the desktop, of course! It just makes sense. Maybe it does — but it sure is amazing how the very same pundits who were sneering at “fat clients” just a year ago — and probably still do — now extol the virtues of just another version of fat client computing.

Napster made peer-to-peer computing fashionable again. Never mind that most Napster downloads came from a small number of big honkin’ machines on the Napster network. Those big honkin’ machines weren’t labeled “server” on the network diagram, after all, and there are a lot of pundits in this industry who are on constant alert for the Next Big Thing.

I say, don’t wait until 2004. If peer-to-peer has such great business potential, take advantage of it right now. Make your end-users’ hard drives shareable.

Okay, maybe that isn’t peer-to-peer’s potential. Maybe it’s making use of all those “wasted” computing cycles on the desktop. That has nothing to do with what Napster was about, of course, but it does have something to do with a screen saver the folks at SETI are using to distribute some of its processing to volunteers around the Internet.

Sound attractive? Maybe, but the major bottlenecks of most business applications are I/O and running the user interface, not calculations. So let’s use peer-to-peer for those. For starters we can, with sophisticated DBMS software, distribute our terabyte databases across the hard drives of all of our desktop PCs.

Or maybe not. Because what happens when employees turn off their desktops before leaving for the night?

That leaves the user interface. Great idea! It’s so great, in fact, that we’re done. We moved that to the desktop in the earliest days of client/server computing.

Comments

|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Alas, poor Yorick.

I may have known him, Horatio, but I don’t know my Shakespeare as well as I thought I did. Several weeks ago, in reference to gripes about technology becoming pervasive in our lives, I said the fault lies not in our technologies but in ourselves.

I ascribed the quote to Hamlet. It should have been Cassius, who was speaking to Brutus at the time. Fortunately, IS Survivalists are a literate lot. My thanks to all who wrote. Just as fortunately, the Great Bard is in the great beyond and can’t sue for misuse of his intellectual property.

While we’re catching up on the subject of intellectual property:

  • In January I described the absurdity of Warner Brothers legal department threatening children with lawsuits for putting up Harry Potter fan club sites on the Web. It appears Warner Brothers isn’t the only company with out-of-control brand police. DaimlerChrysler is seriously considering a lawsuit against General Motors. Why? GM’s new Hummer H2 has seven slots in its grille, infringing on the Jeep Grand Cherokee’s grille slot count.
  • Inspired by DaimlerChrysler, Sesame Street filed a class action suit on behalf of two regular sponsors for misuse of the letter M and the number 3. (Not really, but the way things are going, it could happen.)
  • If you still don’t think intellectual property concerns are out of hand, The Register (www.theregister.co.uk) reports Australia has passed strict new laws that forbid forwarding e-mail without the author’s permission, out of copyright infringement concerns. Once again, the law exceeds satire’s ability to ridicule.
  • Sometimes the brand police need to be more alert: Who on earth came up with Microsoft’s ad campaign for Windows 2000? Filling half the ad with a Windows 95 Blue Screen of Death does show a key benefit of Windows 2000. But doesn’t this do just a wee bit o’damage to Microsoft’s overall image?
  • A column last July predicted Amazon.com would have to open retail stores to survive. Close: Various rumors are floating around about Amazon.com alliances. The first was WalMart — an odd choice, logical from an internally focused process perspective but illogical when thinking from a customer perspective — the WalMart and Amazon.com shopping ambiances have little to do with each other.

    The most recent Amazon.com alliance rumor is Best Buy. That makes a bit more sense — Best Buy even carries a few books in its stores these days — but still seems strained. I still expect Amazon.com and Borders to merge one of these days. That marriage has compelling logic — Borders.com has nowhere near the mindshare of Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble; Amazon.com still needs bricks to complement its clicks.

  • Okay, it’s old news. Last July, in an interview, a spokesman for eBay told an LA Times reporter that its fast-paced Internet business will be ruined if it is subjected to laws meant to govern the brick-and-mortar world. Not that many years ago, a company might be embarrassed to suggest that obeying the law is a problem for it. Bad for the brand, you know. Now, in the BIG/GAS era (Business Is Great/Government and Academics are Stupid), company spokespeople have declared open season on all laws restraining corporate behavior, no matter how egregious. So don’t be surprised if (to take a ridiculous example) power companies insist we need more research before labeling CO2 a greenhouse gas. What’s that you say? They already have? Oh.
  • Last but not least, a branding conundrum. Sharp has announced its plans for a new Linux-based PDA. This should worry Microsoft. Why? It’s a flank attack on the desktop. Any PDA can coexist with all other PDAs so long as it syncs, so unlike the desktop there’s no market barrier for Linux PDAs. An installed base of Linux PDAs, means a population of buyers accustomed to using Linux applications. Their purchase of Linux on the desktop is an obvious next step.

What can Microsoft do to counter this threat? It could market its own Linux product. If Microsoft stayed in character, the only Linux component of its Linux would be the label. Which would lead to an ethical paradox for the Linux community: If it protects the Linux brand, it acknowledges the legitimacy of intellectual property ownership. If it fails to protect it, Microsoft redefines Linux as it chooses.

This is sheer speculation, of course, but it’s fun to imagine Eric Raymond suing to defend the ownership of intellectual property.

Comments