Reinventing computing

Unlike most other industries, the computer industry has two giants in Intel and Microsoft which control the supply of two most important components.
The rest of the industry revolves around Intel's CPU and Microsoft's Windows-Office combo.
If computing has to be made available to the next-generation of users, this Wintel stranglehold needs to be broken.
Various visions of the future of computing have been put forward.

Many prognostications and products have suffered from two flaws. First, their primary focus has been on the developed markets where computers have a near-universal penetration. They tend to ignore today's non-users and the world's emerging markets.

Second, they have looked at only one or two dimensions of the computing ecosystem. What is needed is a set of "rainbow revolutions" to make a difference.

There are important computing challenges that need to be tackled:

Affordability: The existing solution, created by and for people with very high incomes, is too costly and too complicated for most people . While hardware costs have dramatically and monotonically declined over time, software has become more expensive to own and manage. Many of most sotware features are unused and so useless.
Consequently, the total cost of ownership of computing solutions is still very high. (Piracy is a commonly used workaround when it comes to software. But most have to take the non-consumption route when even the pirated software plus the hardware costs exceed their budgets.)

Desirability: The utility of computers derives primarily from the services that it provides users. Even if the total package of hardware and software was affordable, people will not buy unless the services they derived from the computer were relevant to their lives.

Security: Using computers is not for the faint-hearted. Rarely a week goes by without the discovery of some flaw in the software that users have on our desktops which, if left unattended, could cause serious damage to the data we have stored, and perhaps, worse. In a world of connected computers, security has become one of the most important concerns, not just for CIOs but also for individual users.

Ubiquity: It is still hard for users to get access to the information that users have whenever they want and wherever they are.

There are goals which a new solution set in computing needs to meet:

Solve the Challenges simultaneously: The challenges of affordability, desirability, accessibility, manageability, security and ubiquity need to be addressed all at the same time.

Make CommPuting as a Utility: The combination of a computer connected to the Internet needs to be available just like electricity, water or telephony: as a utility.

Enable Human-centred Computing: The way users interact with computers needs to change.
Computing needs to put users at the centre, not the technology.

The revolutions that need to happen to address the goals to meet the challenges are:


Grid: Computing needs to become centralised to simplify the end points and also reduce their cost.

Virtual Computers: The end points that connect to the grid need be little more than "thin clients" handling local input/output. What these virtual computers need is, for starters, the ability to take keyboard and mouse inputs and send them off to the Grid, and get back the virtual desktops for display.

Ubiquitous Connectivity: As both wired and wireless broadband networks proliferate, connectivity between the virtual computers and the Grid will be taken for granted.

Loosely Coupled Software: Rather than looking at massive monoliths which can take forever to build (Longhorn, Microsoft's next-generation operating system, is one example), there is a need to modularise software through openly accessible interfaces at various levels. For example, one can imagine "Visual Biz-ic" as a Lego-like development environment to construct business process management libraries for small- and medium-sized enterprises to mirror their information flows.

Humane Interface: The user interface that is at the edge of human-computer interaction needs an overhaul. Whether it is a shift away from a keyboard and mouse to an increasing use of speech and gestures or 3D virtual reality interfaces or contextual workspaces, it is time for move away from files, folders and icons.



By taking a holistic view of the ecosystem and building a chain of integrated innovation, it will be finally possible to fulfill the dream of making computing accessible to every family, student and employee in every corner of the world. Only then will the true promise of the computer as a means to deliver solutions and services for the next users be realised. This is where the future of computing lies. This is why computing needs to be reinvented. This is where the next technology cycle will begin. This is the next big thing platform and opportunity entrepreneurs have been waiting for. This is a transformation that will take root first in the world?s emerging markets. This is what we need to make happen.

Liberally taken from Rajesh Jain's