This morning just after I got that newspaper, the heavens opened up, we got a nice heavy rain shower to wash the winter grit off of the vegetation. We even got some thunder and lighting up here on the mountain. Of course we are fogged in now which isn't very unusual. All of this made me think of a couple of things. My "woods" daffodils that I planted way down the hill behind the house are probably at their peak. Usually they don't have the luxury of reaching a ripe old age. The deer almost always eat them before the flowers begin to fade. This year the deer have eaten all the crocus that were blooming by our front steps but the flowers in the woods have survived. That's probably some law of random success.
Spring is definitely on the way, last week we had snow on Thursday morning, so we are making progress but it looks like the first mowing of the yards will likely be in April this year so this is a late spring on the east coast.
Perhaps the ability to take a picture of a spring flower, post it to the web, and write an article that will be read by a number of people, all before breakfast, leads me to think that we are on the edge (some of us are over the edge as usual ) of a real technology revolution.
Yesterday I sent out a quotation and asked some friends to guess the author.
Personal computing today is a rich ecosystem encompassing massive PC-based data centers, notebook and Tablet PCs, handheld devices, and smart cell phones. It has expanded from the desktop and the data center to wherever people need it -- at their desks, in a meeting, on the road or even in the air.
Single-purpose applications like word processors and spreadsheets have evolved into rich collaborative tools that help teams share information and work together efficiently. Web services are enabling companies to unlock the knowledge of an organization, empowering individual workers to make more strategic decisions, and turning a company's most valuable asset into a strategic tool that drives competitive advantage.
The result is that the personal computer has become far more than a "cog" in the machine of corporate computing -- it's an essential tool for every individual in the organization. Take the personal out of computing, and most companies would grind to a halt.
When I first read this, I didn't know the author, and it occurred to me that the author probably had not worked in a real corporation. Corporate IT is a work in progress, and progress is being made but often not in the way that the author of the quotation above thinks. Of course most friends guessed that this was Bill Gates speaking. The article, "The PC Era Is Just Beginning," was in response to another article, "Requiem for the Corporate PC."
On the software side, Web-based and -hosted applications, which users can tap into through a simple browser interface, are proliferating. As the utility-computing model takes hold, the case for keeping desktop computers in companies will only grow more tenuous.
The truth is someplace between the two arguments. Just as my deer flowers survived this year in a surprising place, PCs will continue to surprise us. Hosted applications will also continue to amaze us. As much as Bill thinks the applications Microsoft has designed are "rich collaborative tools that help teams share information and work together efficiently," I believe the real collaborative tools are web based and probably going to change the nature of work much more that MS's suite of applications.
I am absolutely astonished by what is happening on the web. This
post started out with a picture I took on my Nikon camera and loaded
into iPhoto. I then used Fraser Speirs' Flickr Export Plugin for iPhoto to upload the photo to Flickr which is a free or for fee depending on what you need photo hosting service. After that I was able to create my Typepad
blog in Flickr. Since I wanted to write a longer blog, I moved over to
Typepad. Because all of these folks are paying attention to web
standards, everything worked seamlessly which is as it should. The
adherence to web standards has created a seamless publishing
environment for those of us who have embraced the web.
Without any doubt there is plenty of rich content and sharing of
information going on in the online world. My guess is that all this
sharing is probably harder in corporations partly because of the IT
organizations, partly because of corporate culture. The corporate
collaboration will happen, just slower than in the rest of the world,
but it will happen.
Instant secure publishing of an article with a picture on the web with no html coding is a dream that few could have imagined. Add to that the tools
to see information on the traffic hitting the article on the web site, and one has to say that these are
amazing advances. Of course to top it off this is all being done wirelessly from my kitchen table to multiple remote servers over a high speed connection that uses my cable. That just has to bring a wow to the lips of anyone who understands how hard this used to be especially considering that these weblogs can talk to each other through "Trackbacks" and people can leave instantaneous comments.
Not to date myself too much, but I can remember when Steve Jobs
drawing a circle on a computer screen was a revolution just twenty one
years ago. We're way beyond that, but I suspect personal computers
will always be a part of this, maybe not in the way that Bill is
thinking right now, but he is a very adaptable billionaire and has even
embraced a corporate blogs which is more that I can say for Steve Jobs.
The web and browser based tools have taken us well beyond the
advances we saw in print publishing brought on by Pagemaker and
LaserWriters. I don't know where this new technology will take us, but
we are seeing a revolution in the way we communicate, publish
information, and link ourselves with others. It will likely change
society and eventually corporations. Teaching others how to embrace
this new openness, might be the biggest challenge.
Implementing it in the business world may well be the best guard against the global competition we're facing.
