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Utility Computing -- What Does It Mean to You?
lastpub asks: "With all the vendors out there touting the latest industry buzzword of 'Utility Computing', I'm curious to find out what developers and IT professionals actually think about what that means. Each vendor has it's own message, and some of them have very nebulous descriptions. When you hear the term 'Utility Computing', what do you think?"
That was a tough one.
"Utility Computing" is a bunch of salesmen claiming that although they have snowed people into buying over priced and useless buzzword compliance year after year after year, THIS time they are selling what the customer needs and wants, not what has the biggest commission.
Yeah right.
What's the primary requirement of a utility? It has to work. If you turn the water faucet on, you expect to get water; if you plug a lamp into a wall socket, you expect electricity; when you pick up your phone, you expect to hear a dial tone.
Exactly! But we will never reach this for three reasons.
1. Moore's Law: Ever expanding functional performacne levels means that computing does not stablize and we will never reach the reliability levels that would earn the name "utility computing." The problem is that faster clock sppeds and more transistors/chip permits an ever expanding set of standards, features, applications, and designs. In contrast, the U.S. has been using 120 VAC, 60 Hz for a 100 years with no real changes, upgrades, version 2 specs, etc.
2. Intercoupling of Devices & Applications: Unlike other utilties, computing elements are highly intercoupled through very complex interfaces. The "API" for electricity, water is simple -- what voltage/pressure and how much current/flow. Water and eletrical devices are mutually independent -- I don't have to upgrade all my lightbulbs when I get a new refrigerator. With traditional utilites, everything is truely plug and play because nothing interacts with anything else (with the minor exception of capacity limits). But with computing, each new feature, standard, operating system, and application has the potential to break other elements of my computing architecture. Until computing can get off the upgrade merry-go-round, it will not be a utility (see #1 for why that will not happen).
3. Industry Structure: The computing industry is structured very differently from most utilties. The independence of computer chip makers, PC makers, OS makers, application makers, and peripheral makers drives incompatibilities and unpleasant interactions between devices. Traditional utilities were highly regulated, vertically integrated organizations (less true today because of deregulation). The Bell System could introduce new features (e.g., PBX systems or touch tone phones) because they owned the phone, the phone making factory, the wires, the switching, the trunk lines, everything. In computing, if you have a problem each vendor can blame a different vendor for the problem and nothing really gets fixed.
I'm not suggesting that we repeal Moore's law, disconnect computers from each other, or regulate the industry. I'm only suggesting that computing is fundamentally different from the simple reliable utilties that "utility computing" would like to emulate.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Which I'm sure most outfits pushing "utility computing" really don't want you to do. It can be construed in the way that most responders did, as 'something that's there, that you just use,' and I suspect that that's what companies are pushing.
It can also be construed in the same cast as "public utility," like water and electricity. Public utilities are either publicly owned by governments, or privately owned and heavily regulated by Public Service Boards. I'm sure the companies aren't pushing for this.
In general use, a utility is something so heavily used that its existence becomes 'assumed.' IMHO, the WORST thing that Microsoft has taught us is that you can have it both ways. For approaching two decades, Windows on PCs has become pretty much a 'utility', nearly always assumed to be there, with no oversight or regulation that a real 'utility' has. In essence, Microsoft has positioned themselves as a Gatekeeper to personal computing, and collects 'tax' on it.
(Should utilities be regulated? Shouldn't the market set prices? Perhaps, but perhaps not when it's truly a 'utility'. Science fiction is full of stories of selling air on the moon at exhorbitant markups.)
This lesson has not been lost on other companies, so now we have a general rush to become gatekeepers, to emulate the 'most successful American company.' This is BAD, for two reasons. In the first place, gatekeeping has worked for Microsoft in the short and middle terms, but is now showing cracks in its foundation.
In the second place, gatekeeping is bad for society. In the gatekeeping model, companies try to own standards instead of cooperate on them. They don't seem to have learned the lesson of how CompuServe, AOL, Genie, The Source, and Prodigy weren't really making it until they surrendered to the open, non-owned Internet standards. As a result, everyone is squabbling over owning small pies rather than a piece of a gigantic pie, even when only a piece of a gigantic pie is far bigger than the small pie.
Our national progress and innovation are being held back by an obsession with the gatekeeper model of business.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The point of utility computing is getting to the point (very rapidly) that customers make their decisions based on real business or personal needs not technical ones. For example, I need water at my house, I need a phone to take orders. Customers should not have to pick a company based on "I need my customers Visa card number to stay secure". That should be built in and automatic. With a utility company you have a comfort, I have never worried that there will be no water at my work location, however I often worry that I won't have a network link to the outside world. Both problems would have an equal impact (no work done today) but one has a history of being reliable, the other does not.
Utility Computing, to me, means WE quit playing around and start doing things right (delivering bullet proof service) and our customers will then start taking our service for granted just like the water company. Of course, when you start taking this service for granted then you start taking us for granted and we drop in status to the sewer repair men of this century. So perhaps I have stumbled on why we are not yet ready for utility computing.