Oliver Bell’s Weblog

As a long term employee of Microsoft you start to notice that several of the arguments involving the company are a little cyclic, they come and go but rarely seem to evolve all that much.

One bell that seems to toll every three of four years involves somebody declaring the death of the PC as we know it, an argument that is generally followed a few months later by a cry of “Long Live the PC”.

This document appeared in my inbox recently, it is written by one of our Principal Technology Specialists based in Brisbane, Geoff Clark. He does an excellent job of summarizing areas where we’re seeing innovation around the PC platform. The document discusses several ways in which the PC has been evolving over the last couple of years, and how we might expect it to evolve in the next couple.

The document itself was written just a little over a year ago, if it was updated today there would be room for additional topics such as the netbook, the role of the PC in robotics and surface computing. In an industry that occasionally feels a little stagnant it is useful to take a step back and look at what is really happening around us.

The document concludes;

Computing processing power, storage capacity and network bandwidth continue to grow at an amazing rate. Some of this growth is being used to drive server-based services, such as core business processes, either within the local data centre or delivered as “software as a service” over the internet. The impact of this growth is increasingly being felt at the edge of the network where we see increasingly productive user-focused computing, such as computer/human interaction and mentor-based functions. By moving these functions to the network edge in the form of the PC, the following advantages are realized:

- Your services can move closer to your customer
- Data entry accuracy is increased – and in many cases, data is entered by your customer
- The interaction with services and business processes become much more engaging and more easily understood

Whatever form factor the PC takes – from desktop, to laptop, tablet or “ultra mobile”, we will see it become even more powerful and in turn even more valued in the organisation of the future. It will be a personal mentor for guiding users through their day, helping them automatically deal with the routine, understand the relevant and enable them to magnify their effectiveness in the organisation.

Geoff has recently started blogging, if you’re interested in reading more of his thoughts you’ll find them here.

Earlier today I had the honor of participating in the Business Stakeholder meetings being held in Seoul preparing for the OECD Ministerial Meeting on “The Future of the Internet Economy” that will take place on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week.

My input to the meeting was pretty straight forwards, the goal was to demonstrate that the evolution of services offered by software has been on a steady trajectory for some years now, and at every stage has offered an increased level of opportunity for those who choose to take advantage of the services offered by the network - then to go on to talk a little about what the future might hold and how government could support that future.

The evolution of the network and the increased level of opportunity that can be witnessed at various points in time is obviously interesting to watch.

Twenty five years ago the PC was a stand alone device offering little or no options for connectivity for the average user or business, as a result data was also stand alone and the effectiveness of your device directly related to the amount of data that you had personally spent time inputting.

Some fifteen or so years ago we moved on a step, the world started to talk about client-server computing and the PC began to integrate with services that were offered by an organizations data center - the PC suddenly became a lot more useful, but in many if not most cases that usefulness still ended at the boundary of your own organization.

Ten years ago the Internet began to become mainstream, some had been using the services of the Internet for longer, many had not. It does not need to be said that this was a pretty revolutionary point in time. Suddenly individuals could search for and obtain information on just about any topic they could dream of. At the same time huge opportunity opened up for business, allowing companies new and old to open store fronts that reached many hundreds of millions of customers.

Then the final stage I talked about was the idea of seamless computing, again a concept that is familiar to many in the technical world, a concept that allows diverse organizations to share data and business processes to build new services that were previously just not possible. This era includes many of the ideas that are still evolving around cloud computing and hosted services.

I chose to talk about the future in the form of three scenarios, looking at the future for the highly connected individual, the highly connected business and the highly connected society. In all three cases we can already see trends and expectations starting to emerge. Much of my presentation focused on extrapolating these trends, predicting the future is a dangerous game, who am I to say what will or won’t become components of how we live our lives in the future.

If you’re interested you can see the details of the presentation here, but at a high level the idea was to provide more empowerment for connected individuals, more opportunity for the connected business and to focus on an increased level of individual participation in the connected society.

The presentation closed with some suggestions for government policy makers around areas that need focus and attention as we create a secure and inclusive internet for the coming years,I outlined the following;

• Provide a framework and foundation for innovation and sustainable growth through the promotion of intellectual property rights, choice and interoperability and a competitive environment for software innovation;
• Promote the open and free flow of people, products, services, and ideas through free and fair trade, preserving freedom of expression online and supporting immigration policies that foster cross-border educational and professional opportunities;
• Create a more trustworthy computing environment by strengthening laws around cybercrime, online safety and privacy in accordance with global and regional norms including the Council of Europe’s Convention on cybercrime and the OECD and APEC Privacy principles;
• Transform education, learning and access to technology and promote innovative IT solutions for healthcare.
• Most important of all… move beyond “The Internet Economy” and return to “The Economy”

The final point is very important here in the Asia Pacific region, and probably other areas of the world as well. I still see many governments in the region segmenting their digital strategy and leaving it to be dealt with by an IT agency or individual technocrats.

The idea of the internet, and the benefits that it brings to individuals, businesses and society as a whole is no longer a new one.

Eventually I would like to think that we will stop thinking about “The Internet Economy” or “eGovernment”, and start thinking about “The Economy” and just “Government” - where technology plays a pivotal but tightly integrated role in the way that services and government business process are delivered.