The Uncertain Promise of Utility Computing

icke writes "A quick overview of where the Economist thinks we are with the The Next Big Thing, also known as Stuff that doesn't work yet. Quoting: 'It is increasingly painful to watch Carly Fiorina, the boss of Hewlett-Packard (HP), as she tries to explain to yet another conference audience what her new grand vision of "adaptive" information technology is about. It has something to do with "Darwinian reference architectures", she suggests, and also with "modularising" and "integrating", as well as with lots of "enabling" and "processes". IBM, HP's arch rival, is trying even harder, with a marketing splurge for what it calls "on-demand computing". Microsoft's Bill Gates talks of "seamless computing". Other vendors prefer "ubiquitous", "autonomous" or "utility" computing. Forrester Research, a consultancy, likes "organic". Gartner, a rival, opts for "real-time". Clearly, something monumental must be going on in the world of computing for these technology titans simultaneously to discover something that is so profound and yet so hard to name.'"

Comments

Carly's explainations

[feed_those_kitties]

Sound a LOT like the way Enron tried to "explain" how their business worked.

If you can't explain what you do in a way a 10 year old can understand, your business will probably fail.

Re:Carly's explainations

[webtre]

It's kind of wierd for the press to actually start asking hard questions. Think tanks like Gartner et al live and die by techno-hype. The latest thing going around in CIO-land is Utility Computing, so we'll see what comes of that.

Profane, not profound.

[robslimo]

If they can't describe it in real world, understandable terms, it's either pseudo-marketing babble or some ethereal, vapor-concept whom the perveyors of can't quite wrap their minds around themselves. In either case, they need to put up or shut up. I'm grow weary of it.

Re:Profane, not profound.

[BooRadley]

It's not all technobabble. They're trying to avoid using the word "commodity."

They're just spinning off commodity computing as if it's the latest, greatest product offering, rather than the natural evolution of technology. Commoditization of technology has been the downfall of just about every past for-profit technology fad. What these companies and groups are doing is trying to pretend that they created the trend, for some reason. In the end, the result is still the same.

Computers will be everywhere

[glenrm]

Computers will be everywhere and the will all talk to each other all of the time. That is all they are talking about, however what makes them nervous is whoever makes this work seemlessly first will be a huge winner.

Re:Computers will be everywhere

[Waffle Iron]

Companies will not own their hardware, but rent it. If they suddenly need 3 times as much CPU, then they get it immediately, and only pay for what they use.

This is different than the current situation where a company must always keep enough hardware around to handle peak loads, which is almost never. And then, if they guessed wrong, they are still screwed.

The problem with that scheme is that most business problems are more dependent on I/O bandwidth than on CPU crunching. Today, you can mail order a gigaflop of CPU horsepower for less than $100. Compute horsepower is not an issue.

The problem is that if you try to ship your computing problems to some other location, you've got to get the data from your site to theirs, so you still need I/O bandwidth at your site. What's worse, now you need a high-capacity WAN link to move it to these arbitrary locations.

You may also have massive databases of background data that need to be referenced to solve your problems. How do you handle this? Send terabytes of data offsite so that a third party can run their Opteron against it for a few minutes? Or do you install a massive Internet pipe so that they can mount your database remotely? Either choice costs more than buying your own Opteron.

"Organic," Grab your shovels

[UrgleHoth]

Sounds like the standard round of buzzword bingo.

The Big Thing

[Tom]

Clearly, something monumental must be going on in the world of computing for these technology titans simultaneously to discover something that is so profound and yet so hard to name.'"

Absolutely. It's called saturation and we're closing in on it. So the marketing drones are in red alert to find something different to sell before the old business runs out.

Note the keyword "different". Also note that to marketing it means something entirely... uh, different, then to you and me.
It's a bit like C++ and C - there is a new paradigm, a new approach, and some real technical differences. A lot of books get written, some people become famous, some rich, a few both. In the end, though, 90% of what you're actually writing doesn't change. It's still "i++;" and "exit 1 /* fucking bug I can't find! */"

Gordian Knot

[Moeses]

"Clearly, something monumental must be going on in the world of computing for these technology titans simultaneously to discover something that is so profound and yet so hard to name.'"

But if you have no idea what it is how can you claim it to be profound? Remember the Segway?

Perhaps the simpler explaination is that they are making lame-brained babble about how there are lots of computers now, there are going to be even more and they need to be easier to use? They then pick some high falutin sounding words that kind of describe some aspect of that as they see it.

Just maybe?!

Really, anything short on details and full of buzzwords probably isn't a big deal - or anything at all. Yes, there are current trends in the way computers are used that is changing. There usually are. There IS a push that people want SERVICES, not computers. They want INFORMATION, not machines. People don't want to worry about running servers and infrastuctures and they also don't want to have to deal with a lot of computery stuff to do things in their daily life like listen to music, communicate, etc.

Nothing new here.

Hand in hand with offshoring

[Phaid]

IBM, HP, etc, are already offshoring massive numbers of jobs. This makes their outsourcing business, where they get paid to manage e.g. AT&T's networks, really profitable. But the problem for them is, the small fish are getting away. Small and medium-sized businesses don't really tend to outsource their IT processes, so there's a lost opportunity. If Carly's vision is implemented and IT becomes a generic service, they'll be able to market it at these smaller organizations and really rake in the dough. It's summed up quite well in this passage:

Some day, firms will indeed stop maintaining huge, complex and expensive computer systems that often sit idle and cannot communicate with the computers of suppliers and customers. Instead, they will outsource their computing to specialists (IBM, HP, etc) and pay for it as they use it, just as they now pay for their electricity, gas and water. As with such traditional utilities, the complexity of the supply-systems will be entirely hidden from users.

This way, the "specialists" can offshore the whole thing, pay a bunch of Indian tech slaves peanuts to run it, and charge you a rate that's just low enough to make it seem like a great deal compared to buying your own systems and paying your own people to run them. Hooray for progress.

Re:Hand in hand with offshoring

[GOD_ALMIGHTY]

This is the exact model that will kill any remotely technical job in the US. You can move this model to accounting, contract review and numerous other routine professional services that business' of all sizes use.

IBM is currently offshoring 100 lawyers to do this and Indian's are being trained in US accounting. In the future large service organizations like H&R Block will have tons of Indians or Chinese trained in the US laws and practices, you will interface with an American account manager who hands you the reports and answers basic questions. Meanwhile, your data will be input by Americans working for around $12 an hour, the data will be shuttled off to the Indian or Chinese service centers and the product will come back to be given to you by the account manager.

The efficiency gains that these large business' are getting from utilizing this model internally will be scaled and productized to appeal to small business, which will be considered a growth market. Local CPAs and a lot of basic work that local lawyers do will be aquired more cheaply by small business using these large service organizations. Some of the large service orgs will partner with local service providers to gain access to thier clients, the same way Intuit markets it's services to CPAs.

The problem for the average middle class US professional is that there are not really any jobs outside of Health Services (nurses, docters) that don't fall into this model. The problem for the country is that we can't just be people who take care of the old and sick and sell stuff. This country has to produce something and there has to be oppurtunity for the middle class and those who are trying to seek entry into the middle class. Democracy and Capitalism don't function without a strong wealth owning middle class.

Does anyone see a solution to this problem? I haven't found one. I've been looking too. Any new industries that we'll be able to move to?

Re:Carly Fiorina

[krog]

CEOs like Carly do nothing to improve the current sad status of fiscal responsibility in corporate America. Man or woman, anyone who is willing to fuck thousands upon thousands of working Americans out of their jobs in order to dump their salaries into a neat little bonus* is Part Of The Problem.

As an AC below me suggested, it is precisely this behavior which might see her head roll from a guillotine someday.

* oh, did I say "little"? I meant $150,000,000, or about $25,000 for every employee she put out of a job in order for HP to "remain competitive" (her words, not mine).

Nothing monumental yet...

[s.d.]

Clearly, something monumental must be going on in the world of computing for these technology titans simultaneously to discover something that is so profound and yet so hard to name.

There's nothing monumental that's really floated to the surface yet. I work in grid computing, which itself is an amazing buzzword that everyone wants to say and no one understands (hell, I am not really sure what the purpose of what I do is).

Everyone's grasping for straws right now, b/c when some research project actually does become useful, they want to be in front of the wave so they can ride it all the way. This is everyone throwing out made up words in the hopes that people will like some (or at least one) of them. Around here, our made up phrase that I love is that we are being called "the cornerstone of cyberinfrastructure." It's even been used so much that they've shortened cyberinfrastructure to "CI" in big rambling memos about our future and direction. It's sort of depressing, though, when you realize that none of this actually means anything yet. Maybe it will one day, but that's not quite here yet.

Reason for Simultaneous Discovery

[jeddak]

"Clearly, something monumental must be going on in the world of computing for these technology titans simultaneously to discover something that is so profound and yet so hard to name.'"

Yup. It's called "Bandwagon." :)

Where do I apply for a job like that?

[rudy_wayne]

Carly Fiorina spews out a bunch of meaningless bafflegab and everyone just nods their head. Once again we see that nobody learned anything from the story of The Emperor's New Clothes.

gender equality

[Anonymous Coward]

>the current sad status of gender equality in corporate America

Obviouslly, you believe the lies spread by political hacks that get paid by perpetuating the myth that a bias agains women still exists in corporate America.

1. Harassment laws and corporat policies favor women over men

2. Diveristy training always includes training on how we should all be sensitive to women but never ever has any training on how everyone should be sensitive to men.

Re:Carly Fiorina

[big-giant-head]

Gee she's done alot for working women, layed them off by the thousands at HP and Compaq, not mention the thousands of contractors that took it up the hiney in houston (at least 30% of whom were working women). On top of that all she has to show for it is a muddled and confusing product line, and she's running long standing customers off in droves (like the co. I work for) and not adding any new ones. At this rate she'll singlehandedly drive HP/CQ into the ground, quite an accomplishment for the little lady.

I think giving women an equal chance is great, but if they are going to do all the same bone headed, greedy crap that men do why bother?

Re:Carly Fiorina

[YoJ]

To think that women would (or should) do a better job than men is quite sexist. The point of gender equality is providing an equal opportunity for men and women to prove themselves. It has always been a problem that women in men's fields face a higher barrier for others to take them seriously; thinking that one shouldn't hire a women if they are not going to be any better than a man just makes this worse.

HP is a weird place

[Simonetta]

In 1994 I got a temp job (temp in the sense that they weren't hiring on less than the PhD level to avoid paying benefits, but permanent full-time in every other respect) at HP-Vancouver Washington.
My job was to disassemble brand-new packaged printers for rebuilding as prototypes for new models and loading the base unit CPU boards with Unix code for their prototype firmware.
I worked in a locked warehouse room with an outdoor loading ramp and about a million dollars worth of packaged printers stacked to the ceiling.
(They'd given me a marijuana unine test so they knew that they could trust me, but of course, no benefits not even morning coffee). My boss and my self were the only people who had keys to this locked storage workroom.
I put a picture of Claudia Schiffer in a evening gown on my PC desktop as wallpaper to keep from going insane in this sealed environment.
After about three weeks, I was fired for 'creating an environment conducive to sexual harassment' for this picture of Claudia Schiffer in a evening gown.
I can't recommend anyone seriously considering working at Hewlett-Packard. Sooner or later their bizarre culture is going to wipe you out regardless of how well you work or try to avoid their weird company politics.
I'm sure that Carly's only made a bad situation worse.

Thank you,

More 'grid computing' nonsense

[mrogers]

From the article:

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, an in-house guru at IBM, pictures an ambulance delivering an unconscious patient to a random hospital. The doctors go online and get the patient's data (medical history, drug allergies, etc), which happens to be stored on the computer of a clinic on the other side of the world. They upload their scans of the patient on to the network and crunch the data with the processing power of thousands of remote computers-not just the little machine which is all that the hospital itself can nowadays afford.

This "guru"'s story is so unrealistic that it's downright dishonest. First, how is the patient identified among the millions of medical records in this miraculous database? The patient must be carrying some kind of identity card, so why not embed his/her medical records in the card instead of putting them online where they are exposed to hackers? (Of course it's still possible for someone to steal a smartcard, but at least it requires a separate attack on each patient rather than a single attack on the entire database.)

Second, how do the doctors authenticate themselves, or is everyone allowed to browse and update the medical records? These are doctors at a "random hospital", so in order to help this patient they must have access to the medical records of everyone in the country. Every doctor has access to every patient's records - great, what happens when one doctor's smartcard goes missing? The entire database is compromised. Again, the only sensible option is to keep each patient's data on a separate smartcard (with an offline backup in case the card is lost). The 'grid' is not the solution here.

Finally, we have the touching story of The Little Computer That Could - the hospital's computer is too slow to crunch the data on its own so it makes use of idle cycles donated by other computers. This completely misses the point of utility computing, which is to make it possible to buy and sell computing resources. If grid computing ever becomes widespread, all those idle CPU cycles will become a commodity and you will have to pay for them. Perhaps some philanthropic souls will donate cycles to the hospital for free, but they're just as likely to donate a real computer - the idea that the 'grid' solves the problem of equipment shortages is absurd.

Next Big Thing

[Anonymous Coward]

The Next Big Thing will not come from large innitiatives at HP, Microsoft, IBM, or any big business. If the history of computers teaches us anything, it's that great innovations arise from small groups or unexpected places, with people trying to solve real world problems, not just trying to find anything new to sell someone. See UNIX, WWW, desktop computers, just to start. Also, very few people, especially the big execs, will see it coming.

I'll tell you what's "painful"...

[jjtime4sko]

Watching Slashdot readers spew on topics they know nothing about.

Newsflash #1: Carly doesn't actually RUN anything. She's the CEO of a 150,000 person company. Asking her to explain in detail any computing architecture is like asking Arnold Schwarzenegger to explain California's budget. Yeah, it's painful. She's also not the person to look to for a good explination.

Newsflash #2: You won't *really* get it until it happens. Do you remember the first time you heard about the web? I was a VAX/VMS programmer in college in 1992 when my brother calls me up and says "Have you heard about this Mosaic program they cooked up?" He tried his best to explain it to me. I didn't get it.

Newsflash #3: To those of you ranting on about Carly: I'm sorry you got fired/laid off from HP or Compaq and you're still bitter. But if you were so damn bright you should have seen the writing on the wall and gotten out on your own schedule. And since you left all divisions are profitable, growing, and the stock is up 25% in the past year. Not exactly the definition of a dying company. Get over it.

It all hinges on quality

[taradfong]

If PCs continue to live in a world of their own among consumer products, utility computing will become 'the answer' to its own problems.

I mean, today, I buy any other piece of consumer electronics, I plug it in, and I use it. It breaks, I throw it out.

With a PC, I have this thing that needs to be maintained, occasionally turned on and off, needs to be asked permission to be turned off, becomes useless when its OS gets EOL'd, has software from dozens of companies on it, and still has stone-age level means of really assessing/changing how it's configured. It's a big load on a consumer's patience and requires much more skill to really safely wield than all but a few geeks possess. (asside: I think this is one reason MS will be surprised at how fast Linux catches on, because the extra ease of use of MS is eclipsed by the 'you can fix anything, there are no dead ends' attribute of Linux) Plus, more and more our PCs hold valuable content (your baby photos, your music library).

So...eventually if someone instead offers a cheap, indestructable maintenance-free terminal and left the ugly issues of data storage, backup, application upgrades, virus definitions, and more to be handled for you remotely somewhere, and if it was done cleanly over a super fast connection, I think this idea will take off because consumers will value convenience over the flexibility and pain of essentially being a 1-man IT department for your own house.