Mobile/cloud chips away at batch processing

Consider a particular type of PC application, one that I call "the spreadsheet app". It processes information. It accepts large quantities of data in (a spreadsheet, or multiple spreadsheets), processes the data, and then provides the results in large quantities of data (another spreadsheet with multiple pages).

In some ways, it is a design of mainframe batch processing: collect all of the input data up front, process it in one large calculation, and provide the results in one large batch.

The PC revolution was supposed to change all of that. The PC revolution was supposed to slay the batch processing beast and make data processing interactive. Yet here we are, thirty years later, still processing data in large batches.

I think that tablets (or more specifically, mobile/cloud) will succeed where the PC revolution failed.

Moving a spreadsheet app to mobile cloud is not easy. A direct port makes little sense: tablets have small screens and data entry into spreadsheets requires fine control for the selection of cells.

A "native" tablet app would take advantage of the strengths of mobile/cloud (interactive displays and fast processing on the cloud servers) and avoid the weaknesses (constrained data entry). Instead of data entry into a large grid of numbers, data must be entered in smaller units. This is possible with lots of spreadsheet apps; their data is often structured into collections (and sometimes collections of collections). Tablets can handle data entry in smaller chunks.

The shift from the spreadsheet grid to a collection of units is the same as the shift from batch processing to interactive processing. The app must accept small units of data, incorporating each smaller unit into the larger whole.

It's possible to build the entire large batch of data in this manner, and then process the batch at once, but its also possible to process each unit of data (a small batch) as it is entered.

Even if each unit of input requires a complete re-calculation of the data, that may be okay. The calculation would be performed on a server (or a set of cloud-based servers) and computing is getting faster and faster. Pushing data to cloud servers for calculations makes sense.

Tablets still have a limited size, and displaying the results may be problematic. One cannot display a raft of numbers on a tablet. (Well, one can display a raft of numbers, by using a very small typeface size. But the results would be undesirable.)

Instead of a text display, apps for tablets will (most likely) use graphical representations for data, with the ability to focus on small sections and see the underlying numbers. We could use this technique today with PC applications, but spreadsheets are limited in their abilities to present information graphically. (I've used Microsoft Excel for years, and the charts and graphic capabilities have remained static for quite a while.)

So that's what I see. Mobile/cloud apps will accept small units of data, process them on fast servers, and present the results in graphical form. The shift from batch processing to interactive processing. The PC revolution will eventually occur and liberate us from the tyranny of batch processing. Ironically, it will occur not on PCs but on tablets and cloud servers.