Where’s the Power?

In the beginning, there were software companies and they were good…well they were OK. They developed their applications and sold them to a public hungry for tools that justified the purchase of a personal computer that had very little practical use unless you were a coder. How many PC’s were sold because of VisiCalc?

But the world has changed. There are many applications to perform the same basic functions. How many contact managers are there? Spreadsheets? E-mail programs? Do a Google search on “free chess game” or “free 3-d modeling software” and you will be amazed by the number of programs available for download.

The software world must keep up. The days of selling shrink-wrapped software are ending. Software companies are under increasing pressure to differentiate themselves from competitors, and it's not just pricing pressure caused by the emergence of the open-source movement. This pressure to differentiate demands mobility between many disparate machines and devices. It also demands a customer service model that accrues experience, eliminating the "start over" every time we have a problem or question. The software companies must find a way to maintain customer loyalty other than through a familiar graphic interface. What happens when voice recognition becomes commonplace? Imagine the ramifications to your address book or music player when you never need to see the GUI.

The learning curve for many applications is burdensome, and in many cases not worth the extra effort. We can get the basics, but the pain associated with mastering a certain software tool is cumbersome. Even experienced users struggle with uncommon features in regularly used applications. The concept that computer users the world over will continue to figure out a never ending flow of software tools and features is not practical. There must be a direct connection between the application provider and the customer, and I don't mean a third-party help desk in Bangalore. Include software updates and future mobility requirements between different devices into the mix and we are looking at a time of accelerating change for the software industry.

So the power shifts. And just like all power, it naturally migrates to the periphery. This evolution will move the center of power from the software companies to the developers and then ultimately to the users themselves. I submit that the end user will soon have the ultimate power in the software hierarchy. And I further submit this newly empowered software user will have access to those applications anywhere, on any device, with the relevant personal data and settings following seamlessly.

Many people believe this portends a service based computing industry. But how do we reconcile these two seemingly different solutions; the web-services provider with all the power at the core verses having more processing power and storage capacity on our local devices?

The future lies in a merging of these different solutions. There must be a service-based organization connecting to and updating these more powerful peripheral devices. More importantly, the data, application settings and software must be updated and mirrored to those devises seamlessly so that if the network is down or disconnected, those peripheral devices still function; something a web-based services organization cannot offer. This is the true marriage of service-based and stand-alone computing power. It is an application service model with mirroring capabilities. Add that together with disconnected functionality and remote control capabilities and you have the ingredients to save the software industry from itself, and make computing simple for everyone.

Joel Allen is president of AllenPort Co., based in Princeton, NJ.

© 2005 Joel E. Allen. All rights reserved

Allen's Law

You've heard of Moore's law. It states that the number of transistors per square inch will double each year for the foreseeable future. You probably have also heard of Metcalfe's law. Metcalfe's law states that the usefulness, or utility, of a network equals the square of the number of users.

But there is one measurement that may be more interesting to future historians and social scientists than any other. A measurement directly relevant to our personal lives. It is a measurement on the level of growth of our personal data store.

To describe this phenomenon, I have created Allen's law. Allen's law states that the size of a person's data store will double each year for the next 10 years, and into the foreseeable future. Moore's law and Metcalfe's law describe a massive growth curve based on a doubling effect, and Allen's law is directly affected and corresponds to that phenomenon. As processor speed doubles, and the network's power increases with more users, there will be a proportional amount of digital stuff that is saved.

Some facts to consider:

1. Currently, less than 20% of the world's data is digitized, with most remaining in non-machine-readable format including paper, microfiche, graphs, charts, and various film. 1
2. The cost of cleaning up old data storage devices is 3 times greater than adding capacity. In other words, it's cheaper to purchase additional storage than to clean up our mess. Consider e-mail. As you probably know, people don't delete much e-mail. Most of the Spam goes directly into our Delete box, but 55% of our messages (4 trillion messages this year) remain. Why don't we clean up our in-boxes? I don't know...maybe the same reason we didn't clean our rooms when we were kids. We seem to all have this paranoia that we will throw something away that we may want or need later. In fact, look at the new web based e-mail offerings from Google and Yahoo! They both are offering nearly 1 gig of personal e-mail storage...that's a lot of crap to keep!
3. We have just begun saving our personal assets digitally. "Beyond the internet, entertainment may be the largest single driver of storage demand on a global basis as we demonstrate an endless appetite for any form of digital entertainment in the home, away from home and even at work."2

According to the Gale Group, our total worldwide data store in 2005 will be 43 Exabytes; that's 43 million trillion bytes. See table below.

Historical numbers look like this.

Assuming these growth estimates proves correct, this hints at some growth industries. Search engines seem obvious now that Google has revolutionized the industry, but it sure wasn't obvious two years ago. And assuming each man, woman and child will have a Petabyte of personal digital assets in 10 years, search is going to come in quite handy. But what about management of that personal data? Are our personal digital assets secure, and can we access them on any device? How will these assets be managed and directed? Will we include them in our estate planning? Where will they be stored? What part of those digital assets will be permanently archived, and which will have a time fuse?

So spread the word. Moore's law and Metcalfe's law describe the power of technology. But Allen's law is about our personal stuff...something that's a lot more real. Hey, maybe our grandkids will be visiting the Antique Road Show for an appraisal. What do you think those old .jpg's are going to be worth?

1 Digital Data's Future - You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet! - © 2000 West World Productions & © 2001 Gale Group.

2 Digital Data's Future - You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet! - © 2000 West World Productions & © 2001 Gale Group.

Joel Allen is president of AllenPort Co., based in Princeton, NJ.

© 2004 Joel E. Allen. All rights reserved