Those of you who know me will know I\u2019m a bit of a geek.\u00a0 I guess to work in IT you have to be to some extent or another.\u00a0 Back when I was at uni I’d think nothing of spending hours tweaking the voltages of my poor over-clocked Celeron 300a processor to get the last drop of performance out of it.\u00a0 The fact it spent most of it\u2019s time idle didn\u2019t really come into it!\u00a0 When I got a real job and all of a sudden I had to work out ways of deploying and managing thousands of PC’s.\u00a0 Suddenly all that detail started to become less important, indeed it got in the way, simplicity was the key.<\/p>\n
Despite all the changes that have happened in the 10 years since then, that same basic rule still stands, and to be honest it always will.\u00a0 Simplicity is always the goal.\u00a0 There\u2019s a great quote from Ray Ozzie about this:\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cComplexity kills. <\/em>Complexity sucks the life out of users, developers and IT.\u00a0 Complexity makes products difficult to plan, build, test and use.\u00a0 Complexity introduces security challenges.\u00a0 Complexity causes administrator frustration.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I think he\u2019s perfectly articulated the problem.\u00a0 My challenge was that deploying IT out to a company of 18,000 odd people who are scattered all over the world just isn\u2019t a simple thing, there is inevitable complexity there.\u00a0 We just have to abstract it from the end users as best we can, and organise ourselves in a way that manages that residual complexity as efficiently as possible.\u00a0 Wouldn\u2019t it be great though if the solutions we use helped us, if they were designed to remove some of that headache?<\/p>\n
To an extent that\u2019s some of the appeal of cloud services.\u00a0 We identify a capability that we want to provide Atkins, but then get someone else to deal with the complexity.\u00a0 In theory all we would need to do it work out a way of consuming that capability.\u00a0 Generally that\u2019s going to be a lot easier than starting from scratch ourselves.<\/p>\n
In a way that\u2019s been the focus of the industry for the past 5 years, working out how to deliver complex services over the internet.\u00a0 We\u2019re now seeing truly viable cloud services emerge from this.\u00a0 Salesforce.com is perhaps one of the most successful \u2013 and mainstream \u2013 business cloud services.\u00a0 Google\u2019s Apps service is doing well, as is Microsoft\u2019s BPOS equivalent (or Office 365 as it\u2019ll soon be known).\u00a0 As well as these complete services there are also interesting cloud services that are designed to be the components of larger systems.\u00a0 MS\u2019s SQL Azure platform can host SQL or Access databases, and Sunguard has an emerging cloud transaction processing offering.\u00a0<\/p>\n
So \u2018cloud\u2019 is here, we can \u2013 and do \u2013 buy services this way.\u00a0 What\u2019s next?<\/p>\n
This is where Ray Ozzie comes back in.\u00a0 If you don\u2019t know of Ray, he\u2019s the guy that came up with Lotus Notes.\u00a0 In the 90\u2019s he then developed the Groove collaboration tool, it was way ahead of it\u2019s time but when online collaboration started to feature in people minds MS bought the product and company.\u00a0 He then took over from Bill Gates as MS\u2019s chief software architect.\u00a0 A clever guy then.\u00a0 Just after he joined MS he wrote a memo<\/a> that basically turned MS\u2019s strategy around and launched it headfirst into the cloud race, it\u2019s worth a read<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Anyway, the quote I mentioned earlier comes from a new memo<\/a> he\u2019s written.\u00a0 In it he talks about his view of what the next 5 years are going to focus on.\u00a0 Again, it\u2019s an interesting read.\u00a0 He doesn\u2019t say anything particularly revolutionary but he does articulate what we\u2019re already starting to see here very well indeed.\u00a0 In essence he believes it\u2019s all about Continuous Services<\/strong> and Connected Devices<\/strong>.<\/p>\n
Ray suggests that internet based services will continue to evolve and form the basis for how capabilities and applications will be delivered, whether that be to individuals or enterprises like ourselves.\u00a0 They\u2019ll be ubiquitous, available to all, and will end up hosting all of our personal and business data.\u00a0 As such they\u2019ll need to be continuously available \u2013 downtime would be disastrous.\u00a0 They\u2019ll need to transparently address the security and privacy concerns of individuals, enterprises and governments alike.\u00a0 Sounds a bit like \u2018cloud\u2019, but of scale that we\u2019ve yet to see emerge.<\/p>\n
With such a huge reliance on these service that we can\u2019t see or touch, how we access them would become hugely important.\u00a0 Of course there will be local software of some sort, whether a browser in the Google model or specific applications as Apple and Microsoft would prefer (a rare area of agreement between them).\u00a0 Ray suggests the difference is that we\u2019ll grow used to accessing these services on devices beyond the computers we use today.\u00a0 There may still be a place for desktop or laptop computers but in time people will adopt more appliance like devices that are cheap, and therefore simple (or dumb) and interchangeable and replaceable.\u00a0 These devices will be use to access and consume these online services, making use of the vast amount of processing and storage they make available.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He also makes the point these devices aren\u2019t necessary just for consuming information, they may also be used to feed information into these services \u2013 some connected devices may just feed telemetry or control information.\u00a0 Again we can see this trend emerging today with things like connected home energy monitors<\/a> that feed information up to apps like Google Powermeter<\/a>.\u00a0 IBM\u2019s Smarter Planet ideas apply the same principle to instrumenting systems in buildings, the buildings themselves and the rolling up all this data into views of cities and countries.<\/p>\n
So in essence the Continuous Services | Connected Devices idea isn\u2019t a million miles away from the world today.\u00a0 Microsoft themselves have long talked about \u2018Software + Services\u2019 and \u2018Three Screens and a Cloud\u2019 (i.e. Computer, Phone and TV all accessing the same cloud services), a model that is shared with the likes of Apple and their appliance like iPad, and in future by RIM and their PlayBook<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What makes Ray\u2019s memo interesting however is that as well as articulating all of this very well, his position at MS (at least for now<\/a>) means that this is likely to form a good part of MS\u2019s thinking over the next 5 years.\u00a0 This is a time when we\u2019ll be seeing new versions of Windows<\/a> and Office appear, and also a time when many organisations will be taking a close look at how they will deliver communication and collaboration.\u00a0 Whether you like MS or loath them, it\u2019s important to understand their thinking as they\u2019ll take a huge part of the IT industry with them, as well of course as some of your clients and customers who also use their software.\u00a0 For now they\u2019re playing catch-up in this field to the likes of Google on the service side and Apple on the device side, it\u2019ll be interesting to see how they fair over the next few years.\u00a0 I imagine we\u2019ll be hearing more about these themes in future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ray Ozzie’s new memo ‘Dawn of a new day’ outline Microsofts vision for challenging Google and Apple on cloud services and devices. Continuous Services and Connected Devices.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,4],"tags":[31,45,441,440,21,412,13,439,442,34],"class_list":["post-853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech","category-work","tag-apple","tag-cloud","tag-connected-devices","tag-continuous-services","tag-google","tag-ipad","tag-microsoft","tag-playbook","tag-ray-ozzie","tag-ss","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=853"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/853\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":854,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/853\/revisions\/854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}