Butterflies and Markets

Well, the report on PC sales has pretty well demonstrated that we do have a new dynamic in terms of “personal computing”, a dynamic in which the device that took its name from the concept is falling out of favor.  This is coming about because a seemingly small force–mobility–is driving a systemic change in human behavior.  A mobile butterfly is changing all our weather.

I don’t have to point out that PC sales are down; we all know that.  I don’t even have to point out that the primary reason they’re down is that we’re reframing our information use around portable devices that can empower us at our point of need; I’ve said that enough already.  What I do have to point out is the way this revolution is unfolding and what that means.

A new Temkin Group report, called Media Use Benchmark, says that people on the average are online twice as long for personal reasons as for work.  Mobility is a big factor in that, because traditional pass-the-time pursuits like watching TV still account for four hours per day.  To get all this extra online time in, people have to be portable/mobile in their activity.  But the key point here is that we’re changing people’s habits by changing their personal lives.  We have not tracked the mobility and point-of-activity empowerment stuff into the workforce yet.

One reason that point is key is that the workplace is an area where PCs continue to be strong.  If we’re just waiting for the right formula for worker empowerment to hit, then we’re not seeing a natural core market for PCs in the workplace, just a market where mobility hasn’t hit yet.  PC sales can fall further, in other words.  Not all the way to zero, perhaps, but certainly we are increasingly likely to see the future PC look more like those convertible tablets than like a PC of today.  Microsoft’s Windows 8 failure lies in the fact that it’s not targeting that kind of device, so it’s not delivering on real value.

For the cloud, this mobile shift has major implications.  Point-of-activity empowerment of workers raises new opportunities for productivity enhancement, which could be enormous in terms of market impact.  It also totally alters the nature of applications, just as smartphones did years ago.  A small appliance used while mobile forces the worker to focus on just what they need, because “what-if” navigation is hardly practical on a little screen or when you’re doing something else.  The mobile/behavioral push into enterprise applications will drive more componentized software, composed worker empowerment, and other high-agility measures.  These, given the existence of the cloud today, will be applications that can be run in a cloud-specific way because we have cloud technology to reference as they’re being designed and deployed.  In short, we have the real driver of a cloud revolution looming, and our PC shift is a symptom that the point of inflection isn’t too far off.  Consumers who are adept at mobile empowerment in their personal lives will want to be mobile-empowered workers in their professional lives.

High levels of application composability and agility create a demand for a different way of thinking about networks too.  The goal is to be able to deliver something that can be depended upon without risking total collapse if something trends huge in the market at a given moment, or risking runaway operations costs to keep that collapse at bay.  SDN is an example of what could be done and how it could happen, and now we’re finding out that the ONF may actually be bowing out of SDN in a realistic sense.

The OpenDaylight stuff we’ve heard about is probably a fusion of a hundred cynical and manipulative motivations, but underneath that it’s also an open source project to do SDN.  It’s not going far enough right now, but it’s going as far as ONF has gotten, and ONF I think realizes that it’s going to be outrun by real, software-coded, progress from some source or another.  Yes it will talk about what it’s going to do next, to try (as all organizations try) to perpetuate itself, but code trumps standards because you can’t deploy standards and you can deploy software.

That’s a key point, I think, the technical inflection under the seismic mobility change.  We cannot address a dynamic future with processes that are so static they appear motionless.  No international network standard these days has any hope of relevance simply because it’s unable to progress at the pace of the market.  There are only two ways to move into the mobile/behavioral future as far as networking is concerned—proceed through a series of open-source experiments that coalesce into an accepted set of practices, or blunder along and hope for the best.  The idea that we’ll define and adopt standards is futile; we’d never have one in time.

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