I wrote and posted the article quoted below 2 years ago on ActiveRain. As we pursue our daily agendas with Blackberry and I-Phone technologies and our use of distant databases and cloud computing is on the rise, I thought it would be worth revisiting. Technology continues to expand exponentially and the world around us is beginning to become a blur. Fasten your seat belts – more to come.
“You have seen several articles from me about Web 2.0 and web hosted applications. It may be useful if I try to put into perspective why I am talking about this particular direction in technology as it applies to our industry.
In 2000, George Gilder wrote the book “Telecosm” and changed my understanding of where we are headed with technology (of course I didn’t get around to reading it until around 2003 – but I haven’t stopped talking about it since). I had listened to Bill Gates talking about bandwidth for more than a decade before Gilder’s book – but I didn’t really get it until Telecosm.
Gilder's premise is that periodically major social changes occur as the direct result of technology changing in ways that drive the cost of a major factor in production to zero. In the late 19th century in the industrial revolution – it was horsepower. In the 1950’s it may have been electricity. In the 1990’s it was personal computer power. Those of you who entered into personal computers when I did in the early 1980’s will remember the concept to time share computers with dumb terminals controlling large computer systems – sometimes at a hard wired distance. In the 1990’s we started to see more and more processing power and storage capacity being put into desktop computers because communications capacity (bandwidth) was costly and the most efficient model was to place the data and the applications together on the desktop.
Now at the dawn of the 21st century, bandwidth is becoming plentiful and cheap and the distributed processing model of computing will rise again. We will see dumb terminals (read cell phones) accessing powerful computing applications and data from around the world. Data travels at the speed of light through fiber optic cables with practically unlimited capacity. Once the fiber optic infrastructure is in place – improvements in the transmission equipment at the ends continue to increase the capacity of the fiber optics with minimal increased investment. And nothing will be the same again.
By the way, when I was in school, the speed of light was a theoretical limit that was difficult to imagine (186,000 miles per second). Now it is an operational bottleneck that we have to get around. Communications satellites orbit the earth in geosynchronous orbits at approximately 26,000 miles. (their orbital speed matches that of the Earth’s rotation so the satellite seems to hold its position relative to a point on the surface of the Earth) You need only watch the news from Iraq to see the delay between the question asked in New York and the response from Baghdad. The signal which has to travel up to the satellite, down to Baghdad – back up to the satellite and back to New York is almost unusable for communications because of the delay that the signal which can only travel the speed of light experiences. The solution is apparently a new series of satellites orbiting at around 500 miles above the Earth to lesson the time lag in transmission.
So I believe that the remotely hosted applications accessible from any internet connected computer or cell phone are the wave of the future and the early applications are appearing now. Companies like Global Crossing have criss-crossed the globe with fiber optic cables under the oceans. These companies did not survive the changes they created (you can tell the pioneers – they are the ones with the arrows in their backs), But their legacy to us is virtually unlimited worldwide bandwidth that is fast, efficient and cheap – and is only beginning to be tapped to serve our needs.
Bill Gates – I understand now.
Mr Gilder’s book, Telecosm, is available from http://www.amazon.com/”
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