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.

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.

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.

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.

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: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.

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.