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Future of Desktop PCs

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 16:25:00 +0000

This week, John Herlihy from Google made a statement that was cited by Mashable and stirred some controversy in the comments. Mashable made it though the Friday Poll. The statement in question was:

“In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant. In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs.”

This has inspired me to write my own thoughts on the subject. Here we go:

Absolute statements obviously stir controversy, and that’s intentional. He did, however, not mean to say that Desktop PCs will cease to exist - they will just disappear from the mainstream. Vinyl record players and traditional film photography are very well alive - but not for the mainstream.
The Web Browser has become the most important application in our computers and we do more and more activities online, in the cloud. In this scenario, the underlying operating system becomes less relevant. Google wants to reduce this operating system to its minimum with Chrome OS. Step-wise, more and more applications which previously required a local installation are now ready for the browser.
About half a year back, I had commented on Kevin Kelly’s TED Talk about the next 5000 days of the web. I believe we will see significant shifts in this period of time, but still believe in what I said in this comment: The infrastructure will change. Today the traditional PC and browser may be the tool to access this emerging cloud and applications will be framed as HTML pages, but that is not the end of evolution. We’ll continue to innovate.
I don’t think everything can be done on smartphones, sometimes you just want a bigger screen. I cannot imagine Desktop PCs disappear from offices, but I think they will no longer be seen in homes of non-geeks. A combination of Internet-powered TV - set-top box or gaming console - and smartphone (or maybe an iPad) is sufficient for normal home users. Why should they deal with a full-fledged PC’s problems like operating system ituning, anti-virus installation etc. when all they use their PC for is to fire up a browser and check mails and Facebook, and write a word document twice a year?
PCs are about freedom, the freedom to install and configure anything the user wants. Consumer electronics, and that may includes devices like phones as well, are limited. The challenge is to reach to an application economy that gives consumers freedom of choice in a safe and sane manner without restricting them or censoring - if you have ever read about Apple’s Appstore, you know what I am talking about …

What is your opinion about the future of computing?

Happy Holi!

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:32:08 +0000

Happy Holi!

A few impressions from my trip to Nandi Hills near Bangalore...

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 13:34:51 +0000

A few impressions from my trip to Nandi Hills near Bangalore last Sunday. What a beautiful sunset!

Blog Design Changes

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 13:29:00 +0000

Today I have worked on the design (Tumblr theme) of this blog. There were quite a few things pending to be done (for example you could not navigate back to older entries) and I optimized a few things. I hope you like it!

Git, Github and WADL2DB

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 09:37:22 +0000

No software project could exist today without version control. Version control makes it easy to track changes in the code and to collaborate. Previously, I had always used SVN (Subversion) for that purpose. Now increasingly I hear about git and, related to that, github, a place for so-called Social Coding. Being curious about git and the buzz around github, I decided to try it out. I have just done the basics and so far I feel the major difference between git and svn is the decentralized approach and that I first commit changes to my own copy and then only push it to the central server. And it doesn’t come with revision numbers, a feature I think I might be missing, but that only experience can tell.

To test out github, I have created my github profile and uploaded a very tiny project called WADL2DB. It’s an XSLT stylesheet used to generate documentation in DocBook format based on a web application description in WADL. I like using DocBook as a documentation tool and I use WADL to describe REST-ful APIs, so I was writing the stylesheet to help me generate documentation and save double workload. Future plans are to enhance this with XSD-based API descriptions. So if this could be helpful for you, go and check it out!

Blog/Site Redesign

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 15:56:41 +0000

On the last few weekends, whenever I had a little time to spare, I worked on a redesign of this blog / site. Most of it should be done by now and I made the changes live, so you can see it! Feedback is appreciated, but don’t be harsh, as I am not a designer (but always willing to learn new things)!

I have to get back to do some ‘real work’, so the fine tuning may take some time, but I want to give credit already to the creators of material that I have used:

The patterns are from coy-dreamer.com (deep link).
The icons (RSS/Twitter) are from jankoatwarpspeed.com (deep link).

Thank you!

A few impressions from my trip to the Hogenakkal Falls yesterday...

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:20:01 +0000

A few impressions from my trip to the Hogenakkal Falls yesterday - Indias Republic Day (and therefore my holiday).

BusinessWeek: The Same, but Different

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:41:00 +0000

BusinessWeek: The Same, but Different :

BusinessWeek compares two successful IT companies from the Silicon Valley: Apple and Google. The following points stand out: Work Ethic, The employees who matter and How decisions get made. In those regards, the companies are completely the opposite and still this is the major driver for their success.

Now think about it. What drives your company?

"The secret to changing the world isn’t you having good ideas. It’s getting those ideas into the..."

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 11:38:00 +0000

“The secret to changing the world isn’t you having good ideas. It’s getting those ideas into the heads of other people.”

- Very interesting article and worth reading:

The Alexander Graham Bell Guide to Changing the World by Jonathan Morrow

Birthday Statistics

Sat, 09 Jan 2010 08:19:45 +0000

First of all: Happy new year once again!

My birthday’s already been a few weeks ago and obviously many people send me their congratulations (go figure!). Apart from those who met me face to face, I received the greetings through many different channels. I thought it could be interesting to see which channel is the most popular, so I made the math:

As you can see … Facebook is the most popular channel! I assume this is because Facebook has reminders for birthdays and people are already on the site so they use the same site to send their message. The Facebook channel again breaks down to wall messages, private messages, messages sent through applications and comments on one of my own posts.

E-Cards, E-Mails, IM, SMS and phone calls where all there, as you can see. The most unexpected was the message in XING … and of course the Twitter direct message. 140 characters are enough for everybody, right?!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Fri, 25 Dec 2009 15:28:15 +0000

This is for all my friends, family, colleagues etc. … I want to say thank you for the greatest and also the less amazing moments and experiences we shared throughout the last year! I wish you great holidays and all the best for the coming year!

Home for Christmas at my parents’ place … A Winter...

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 08:28:36 +0000

Home for Christmas at my parents’ place … A Winter Wonderland outside my window!

My birthday surprise last night!

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 05:18:17 +0000

My birthday surprise last night!

Globals, the company of infamous young CEO Suhas Gopinath,...

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 06:05:36 +0000

Globals, the company of infamous young CEO Suhas Gopinath, celebrates its 9th Anniversary

What is the Cloud?!

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:44:38 +0000

Last week, I attended the Business Technology Summit 2009 in Bangalore, which took place in the JN Tata Auditorium of the Indian Institute of Science. It was the third event of that kind that I had been to here in Bangalore, and the second one organized by Saltmarch Media, who did once again a good job in bringing together interesting speakers to a smooth, well-organized summit. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to see all of it, because I had to go to my office as well and only attended parts of the sessions.

Even though it was advertised as one topic within many, Cloud Computing was THE topic of the summit. Every speaker talked about the cloud. The cloud is the buzzword number one this year, it seems. Everybody uses the word in their sales pitches to advertise their product as something that has never been there before. Compared to that, it was quite refreshing to see the speakers of the summit being very much aware about the hype of the word “cloud” and quickly boiled down to the real facts that define cloud computing and whatever fits in this model and how.

In this first post about the BT Summit, I will write about the definition of the cloud. Because, as one of the speakers put it, we should not “repeat the mistake done with SOA” that everybody talks about without knowing what they are talking about (which, of course, might be an unfair generalization). Actually, there is even a definition of Cloud Computing by the US NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), for which I found a presentation on Slideshare. The following information is mainly based on my notes of the presentations given by Ramkumar Kothandaraman, Robert Schneider and Dr. Bob Marcus on the first day of the summit:

Cloud Computing is about moving resources off premises and into the Internet. Cloud service providers give their users the illusion of unlimited resources at their disposal and the pricing for those is based on a pay-as-you-go model without upfront costs. This makes a service provider a Cloud service provider, therefore an old-fashioned webhoster - because he charges you on monthly basis - is not a Cloud service provider according to that definition. All Cloud service providers can be put into three categories, or service-levels:

SaaS - Software as a Service
PaaS - Platform as a Service
IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service

Now these things are not really new. As Robert Schneider pointed out, SaaS providers were called ASP (Application Service Provider) before and in the old days the concept was already known as Timesharing. Cloud-IaaS is also known as Utility Computing.

The most important of those three could be PaaS. Dr. Bob Marcus called it the “Battlefield of Cloud Computing”. Whoever controls the platform, controls the cloud. PaaS can be a hosting platform, or an integration platform like the Facebook Platform or Salesforce.com. Applications (SaaS) are built against those platforms. As Robert Schneider said, “we [the application developers] buy in the vendor’s vision of how applications should be built”. Right now this leads us to vendor lock-in (good for the platform!), which could only be avoided by standards, but those do not exist yet. IaaS doesn’t have that much of vendor lock-in, because the infrastructure offered is very basic.

Ramkumar Kothandaraman gave a good comparison of Amazon AWS, Microsoft Windows Azure and Google AppEngine which, from left to right, come from a less constrained, less automated to a more constrained, more automated approach to application hosting; with Amazon AWS offering basically “bare” servers and Google AppEngine even restricting on programming language. Microsoft is in the middle. Ramkumar gave another interesting presentation on Azure, but I will cover that in another blog post.

The main take-away message for a software developer, who could have been the main target audience, was put very well by Schneider: “Whatever the beast is called [SOA, cloud computing], learn about APIs, webservices, XML - they’re in all of this!”

The Cloud is here to stay! But “being on the cloud” doesn’t solve all problems, but creates their own, new challenges as well. I will write about that again.

The Future of Interface Design

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 11:52:01 +0000

The Future of Interface Design:

For your daily dose of visionary stuff, a post with some nice videos about possible future ways of human-machine interaction. How long it will take to make them reality and do we really want all of it?!

Lunch Break at BT Summit

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:41:09 +0000

Lunch Break at BT Summit

Business Technology Summit

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 04:37:12 +0000

Business Technology Summit

"Both McDonalds and Google have a lot in common: both are designed for you to switch off your brain..."

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:34:50 +0000

“Both McDonalds and Google have a lot in common: both are designed for you to switch off your brain as soon as you enter the “door”.”

- from a Smashing Magazine Article

Happy Diwali!

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 18:48:12 +0100

Happy Diwali!