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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.'"
All that they're flogging is this: lots of intercommunicating little computers in everything. We're already about halfway there -- between the XBox, Tivo, and KISS Technology's (GPL-violating) DVD player, *normal* people are more likely than ever to have a computer connected to their television without even knowing it.
I thought the core idea of IBM on-demand computing was having a box with 12 processors, but you are only paying for 4. Then, during a particularly busy time, your CPU usage goes way up- 80%. You then have the flexibility of having other CPU's "turn on" to meet the load... think of it as being able to handle a slashdotting dynamically ('cept with CPU, not bandwitdh).
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
The winner will be the one that provides information management at O/S level. Right now, O/Ss can do a lot of technical stuff, but they can't manage information. External apps are needed for that.
But humans want to manage information, not an O/S. The first operating system that manages information instead of binary files will be the basis for a huge winner.
that's the general goal as I understand it, but it manifests itself in different forms. IBM's autonomic computing for example, tries to go further. A system with autonomic software installed is suppose to be able to detect when the system is failing and take itself out of availability. The ultimate goal of autonomic based on what is published is the system will try to fix itself.
Much of this is based on the recent research and work done by academic and research institutions. All of them want to have it so an application can find out if there are free resources out there and send a discrete chunk of work to it to distribute the processing. The marketing BS is just the necessary evil.
Actually, I think Indians are much more familiar with Darwinian reference architectures than over-fed Americans who go running to their government safety nets whenever things get a little tough.
to me, they sound like all the different Microsoft execs (Ballmer, Gates, etc) trying to answer the question "What is .NET?" I know there was a business2.com article that sampled some responses, but I cant seem to find it at the moment. IIRC, one quote was along the lines "So much of our stuff has a '.NET' label attached to it, even we dont know what it is at times."
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
There's been lots of good talk about market saturation (cpu, db & os) scaring marketing drones, the desire to lower labor costs (outsourcing), software getting smarter and so on... The thing I haven't seen mentioned is how the real commodity will be networking and the need for shared information (storage). I don't think the next big thing will really be about cpu. I think this is going to be more about information "discovery". I think that's the next big wave they should be for which we should be prepared. More CPU cycles are use for collecting, saving, distributing and presenting information than actually "doing" things with a system (such as interactive entertainment, analysis, etc). Credit agencies make far more than ANY asp EVER has.
If the network is everywhere, easy and economic - outsourcing storage is perfect. Outsourcing CPU takes much more work (as we've pointed out). What will become profitable is not what can you do with a computer, but though the internet it is now, what can you know through a computer. It will become VERY profitable to make masses of information meaningful (information discovery). Take for example google. Or how about big brother... er, I mean Tom Ridge's TSA/Homeland Stupidity initative to link your grades, credit score and medical records together to determine if you're a terrorist. Yes, it's aweful, but this is what the powers that be want. And it's what you want judging from the popularity of google.
They are expecting networking to get better and better to make this happen so that information and its software is more interesting. The problem is politics. The FCC and the varrious state public utility commissions are all bribed by big telecom, and have NO interest in doing something innovative that might help its citizens and break the business monopoly of build it, sit on your rear, make money. You want to know who will? China. No infrastructure in place, slave labor, easy government bribery... it's the perfect business growth environment.
Ya, the network will make it happen, but the pessimist in me says it's not going to be here.
Democrats and Republicans only disagree about how to enslave you
... should not be naming technology. As someone else pointed out, a 10 year old should be. If a 10 year old names it, and the name is accurate, grown ups will understand.
So explain what it does to a 10 year old, Carly, then let the 10 year old name it, and maybe someone will buy it.
Lucent was the one before hp/c. I forget the one prior to Lucent. And they pay her for it. I tell ya, I want HER job: the shittier you are and less you do, the more you get.
I wish I had mod points today, to mod this post up even more.
;)
This exactly describes what Oracle's doing with their "Grid" computing. They want you to shaft Sun, HP, etc., by buying super-cheap white box computers, and putting Linux on them. What they never seem to mention is that their SOFTWARE doesn't get any damned cheaper, even if the hardware is free, relatively speaking.
Hmmmm, let's see how this works. If I buy two 4 CPU Sun Fire 480 systems at $35k each, plus a couple of smallish NetApp Filers at $30k each, then I've spent $130k on hardware. Just to be fair, add $20k of infrastructure cash to that, and call it $150k. Licensing Oracle on those two boxes, with the clustering option, will run in the neighborhood of $144k per server, assuming you can negotiate a 40% discount. That means $150k for hardware, and $288k for *just* the database software.
In the new "grid" world, you'd buy at least four boxes, with two processors each. As an example, a decently configured Dell PE1750 runs about $4500, with no operating system. You could buy five of those for $22.5k. Add the same $60k for filers, and go cheap on the infrastructure for $10k. You'd spend $92.5k on hardware. Since Oracle doesn't give a significant price break for smaller computers, you can license the cluster-capable version of their database for somewhere around $72k per server, again assuming a 40% discount. With five servers, that's $360k for software and $92.5k for hardware. Going with smaller servers saves you a grand total of $17k, but a much larger share of it goes in good ol' Larry's pocket, rather than begin given to those bastards named Scott, Carly, or Bill.
Of course, the real answer is probably to start out with the second scenario, but tell Larry and his minions to piss off, and using some sort of proper free database software.
" After a while it turned into this impossibility and the term 'AI' turned into a serious no-no when you make a presentation to an investor."
What turned into an impossibility wasn't AI itself, but most of the wildeyed pie-in-the-sky promises that usually result when money's involved. There were some successes with AI (some still going strong, and AI is still part of a programmers toolkit), but most fizzled out (most in corporate have seen the marketing promise this, and the failed results cycle). The question now is have we learned our lessons from the past, and is AI mature enough to base a bigger future upon?
However, Carly has been doing a sensationally poor job. She's cut HP's legendary calculator engineering team. She's managed to kill worker morale in a long running high-profile spat with the well-liked HP founding family. She's cut a lot of jobs, which is okay *as long as HP can continue to provide acceptable service*. She's moved HP back into the PC market, a market that has killed countless companies, and one that HP has been trying to extracate itself from for years, without any good justification of how HP is going to do better this time around. She took part in a high-profile and expensive merger with Compaq, a deal that has benefited few folks but those as Compaq. She's antagonized Microsoft in the high-profile "Tablet PC" incident and in snubbing their music system -- while this may make us Slashdotters chortle with glee, snubbing Microsoft is only a good move if you stand to gain significantly from doing so. Otherwise, you're just using poor diplomacy.
:-(
People get irritated because there's a perception (and one that is, I think, not unfounded) that she's getting awfully gentle handling because it looks good and modern for HP to have a female CEO, and she's female, and that a male CEO would have been fired by now.
In general, I tend to feel that Carly is doing a really, really awful job. I will admit that I am not on the board, and don't have all the information about what she's doing. I tend to find out about her when HP gets in the news. However, compare the times Carly has been in the news with the times that Steve Jobs has been in the news. While I'm sure that some of this is just that Apple is better than HP at manipulating the press, the press is still reporting facts. Jobs has pushed a number of things out that have done Apple good. While he has had rather hefty bonuses (ignoring his much-ballyhooed $1 salary), he also isn't making obscene bonuses for dubious mergers, as Carly is.
Of course, *Carly* isn't a one-button-mouse fetishist...
May we never see th
I suspect that few folks in a merger would call it particularly "smooth", especially when there are redundant positions.
However, HP/Compaq had numerous reports of pretty awful problems combining things. The press, at least, represented it as one of the messier major mergers in recent history.
May we never see th
What they are talking about is trying to automate IT to such a degree that there can be an order of magnitude reduction in IT staff.
As in: uh-oh, something changed in your business activity and your network needs to be rearranged. Some servers have to be taken off of one task and assigned to another. Lots of software needs to be reconfigured. Maybe you need to lease some additional servers for a little while and get them online quickly.
If you could do that mostly automagically, that saves on IT labor. If you could do that with the granularity of minutes or hours instead of months, then your IT labor looks like John Henry vs. the steam drill.
Is it a realistic plan? Hmm. Maybe. Realistically, it requires a lot of ISVs and platform providers to integrate with system management infrastructure --- and that's exactly what a bunch of them are working on. (Look at the Red Hat product roadmap for one example.)
The devil's in the details. There's an aweful lot of software to integrate to make it work and an aweful lot of aspects to that integration. Meanwhile, while it can save IT costs (in theory) -- it doesn't actually add any new _functionality_ to the software. In other words -- it will help someone like Amazon reduce their payroll, but it won't have the kind of impact that let Amazon introduce a whole new business model and corresponding growth.
I'd make an analogy to what's going on at my local grocery store. They took out 3 or 4 checkout lines (the kind staffed with a clerk and sometimes bagger) and replaced those with 4 self-checkout self-bagging "speed" lines (and one clerk that's supposed to watch all four and make sure nobody is stealing). "Productivity" increase without either job growth (job loss, actually) and without meaningful product improvement -- story of our times. (It's not even the case that using one of these speed checkouts gets you 15% off the cost of your groceries -- it's atually a degredation of the product.)
I find it strange that someone considers putting Claudia Schiffer on his desktop proper workplace behavior. Maybe it is if you work at a garage, but it's not going to be accepable at any Fortune 500 company.
Thank you for taking the time to reply. I posted the photo on a PC that was in a room that was locked to all people except for me and my boss. It was not an accessable workplace. My boss, who was 15 years younger than me, had me tossed out of the company without review or comment.
It was only a picture of a beautiful young woman in an evening gown head and shoulders. Not a playboy foldout or cheezecake garage bikini shot.
This is what makes H-P weird. Again it was 1994 near the height of politically -correct hysteria, but these policies never change once instituted in any Fortune 500 company.
There was no possiblity of a lawsuit from anyone.
I believe that the ability to put a wallpaper on the PC screen that I am using daily is none of the concern of the employer. Lately I put images of Renaissance Madonnas as wallpaper, Botticelli and Rapheal. I would like to see a 500 year old painting of the Virgin Mary be declared as 'sexual harassment'. Then I would sue and have the art world, the Playboy foundation, the Church, and the anti-PC community on my side with a few women-studies professors and clueless Human Resources people on the other side.