With no clear IT leader, expect lots of changes

The introduction of the IBM PC was market-wrenching. Overnight, the small, rough-and-tumble market of microcomputers with diverse designs from various small vendors became large and centered around the PC standard.

From 1981 to 1987, IBM was the technology leader. IBM lead in sales and also defined the computing platform.

IBM's leadership fell to Compaq in 1987, when IBM introduced the PS/2 line with its new (incompatible) hardware. Compaq delivered old-style PCs with a faster buss (the EISA buss) and notably the Intel 80386 processor. (IBM stayed with the older 80286 and 8086 processors, eventually consenting to provide 80386-based PS/2 units.) Compaq even worked with Microsoft to deliver newer versions of MS-DOS that recognized larger memory capacity and optical disc readers.

But Compaq did not remain the leader. It's leadership declined gradually, to the clone makers and especially Dell, HP, and Gateway.

The mantle of leadership moved from a PC manufacturer to the Microsoft-Intel duopoly. The popularity of Windows, along with marketing skill and software development prowess led to a stable configuration for Microsoft and Intel. Together, they out-competed IBM's OS/2, Motorola's 68000 processor, DEC's Alpha processor, and Apple's Macintosh line.

That configuration held for two decades, roughly from 1990 to 2010, when Apple introduced the iPhone. The genius move was not the iPhone hardware, but the App Store and iTunes, which let one easily find and install apps on your phone (and pay for them).

Now Microsoft and Apple have the same problem: after years of competing in a well-defined market (the corporate PC market) they struggle to move into the world of mobile computing. Microsoft's attempts at mobile devices (Zune, Kin, Surface RT) have flopped. Intel is desperately attempting to design and build processors that are suitable for low-power devices.

I don't expect either Microsoft or Intel to disappear. (At least not for several years, possibly decades.) The PC market is strong, and Intel can sell a lot of its traditional (heat radiator that happen to compute data) processors. Microsoft is a competent player in the cloud arena with its Azure services.

But I will make an observation: for the first time in the PC era, we find that there is no clear leader for technology. The last time we were leaderless was prior to the IBM PC, in the "microcomputer era" of Radio Shack TRS-80 and Apple II computers. Back then, the market was fractured and tribal. Hardware ruled, and your choice of hardware defined your tribe. Apple owners were in the Apple tribe, using Apple-specific software and exchanging data on Apple-specific floppy disks. Radio Shack owners were in the Radio Shack tribe, using software specific to the TRS-80 computers and exchanging data on TRS-80 diskettes. Exchanging data between tribes was one of the advanced arts, and changing tribes was extremely difficult.

There were some efforts to unify computing: CP/M was the most significant. Built by Digital Research (a software company with no interest in hardware), CP/M ran on many different configurations. Yet even that effort could not span the differences in processors, memory layout, and video configurations.

Today we see tribes forming around multiple architectures. For cloud computing, we have Amazon.com's AWS, Microsoft's Azure, Google's App Engine. With virtualization we see VMware, Oracle's VirtualBox, the aforementioned cloud providers, and newcomer Docker as a rough analog of CP/M. Mobile computing sees Apple's iOS, Google's Android, and Microsoft's Windows RT as a (very) distant third.

With no clear leader and no clear standard, I expect each vendor to enhance their offerings and also attempt to lock in customers with proprietary features. In the mobile space, Apple's Swift and Microsoft's C# are both proprietary languages. Google's choice of Java puts them (possibly) at odds with Oracle -- although Oracle seems to be focussed on databases, servers, and cloud offerings, so there is no direct conflict. Things are a bit more collegial in the cloud space, with vendors supporting OpenStack and Docker. But I still expect proprietary enhancements, perhaps in the form of add-ons.

All of this means that the technology world is headed for change. Not just change from desktop PC to mobile/cloud, but changes in mobile/cloud. The competition from vendors will lead to enhancements and changes, possibly significant changes, in cloud computing and mobile platforms. The mobile/cloud platform will be a moving target, with revisions as each vendor attempts to out-do the others.

Those changes mean risk. As platforms change, applications and systems may break or fail in unexpected ways. New features may offer better ways of addressing problems and the temptation to use those new features will be great. Yet re-designing a system to take advantage of new infrastructure features may mean that other work -- such as new business features -- waits for resources.

One cannot ignore mobile/cloud computing. (Well, I suppose one can, but that is probably foolish.) But one cannot, with today's market, depend on a stable platform with slow, predictable changes like we had with Microsoft Windows.

With such an environment, what should one do?

My recommendations:

Build systems of small components  This is the Unix mindset, with small tools to perform specific tasks. Avoid large, monolithic systems.

Use standard interfaces  Use web services (either SOAP or REST) to connect components into larger systems. Use JSON and Unicode to exchange data, not proprietary formats.

Hedge your bets  Gain experience in at least two cloud platforms and two mobile platforms. Resist the temptation of "corporate standards". Standards are good with a predictable technology base. The current base is not predictable, and placing your eggs in one vendor's basket is risky.

Change your position  After a period of use, examine your systems, your tools, and your talent. Change vendors -- not for everything, but for small components. (You did build your system from small, connected components, right?) Migrate some components to another vendor; learn the process and the difficulties. You'll want to know them when you are forced to move to a different vendor.

Many folks involved in IT have been living in the "golden age" of a stable PC platform. They may have weathered the change from desktop to web -- which saw a brief period of uncertainty. More than likely, they think that the stable world is the norm. All that is fine -- except we're not in the normal world with mobile/cloud. Be prepared for change.

Perhaps history should be taught backwards

A recent trip to the local computer museum (a decent place with mechanical computation equipment, various microcomputers and PCs, a DEC PDP-8/m and PDP-12, and a Univac 460) gave me time to think about our techniques for teaching history.

The curator gave us a tour, and he started with the oldest computing devices in his collection. Those devices included abaci, Napier's Bones, a slide rule, and electro-mechanical calculators. We then progressed forward in time, looking at the Univac and punch cards, the PDP-8 and PDP-12 and Teletype terminals, then the Apple II and Radio Shack TRS-80 microcomputers, and ended with modern-day PCs and tablets.

The tour was a nice, orderly progression through time,

And perhaps the wrong sequence.

A number of our group were members of the younger set. They had worked with smart phones and iPads and PCs, but nothing earlier than that. I suspect that for them, the early parts of the tour -- the early computation technologies -- were difficult.

Computing technologies have changed over time. Even the concept of computing has changed. Early devices (abaci, slide rules, and even hand-held calculators) were used to perform mathematical operations; the person knew the theory and overall purpose of the computations.

Today, we use computing devices for many purposes, and the underlying computations are distant (and hidden) from the user. Our purposes are not merely word processing and spreadsheets, but web pages, Twitter feeds, and games. (And blog posts.)

The technologies we use to calculate are different: today's integrated circuits do the work of 1960's large discrete electronics, which do the work of lots of wheels and cogs of a mechanical calculator. Even storage has changed: today's flash RAM holds data; in the 1970s it was core memory; in the 1950s it was mercury delay lines.

The changes in technology were mostly gradual with a few large jumps. Yet the technologies of today are sufficiently different from the early technologies that one is not recognizable from the other. Moving from today to the beginning requires a big jump in understanding.

Which is why I question the sequence of history. For computing technology, starting at the beginning requires a good understanding of the existing technology and techniques, and even then it is hard to see how an abacus or slide rule relates to today's smart phone.

Perhaps we should move in the reverse direction. Perhaps we should start with today's technology, on the assumption that people know about it, and work backwards. We can move to slightly older systems and compare them to today's technology. Then repeat the process, moving back into the past.

For example, storage. Showing someone a punch card, for example, means very little (unless they know the history). But leading that same person through technology (SD RAM chips, USB memory sticks, CD-ROMs, floppy disks, early floppy disks, magnetic drums, magnetic tape, paper tape, and eventually punch cards) might give that person an easier time. For someone who does not know the tech, studying something close to current technology (CD-ROMs) and then learning about the previous tech (floppy disks) might be better. It avoids the big leap into the past.

Punctuated evolution

Biology has the theory of "Punctuated Evolution": periods of stable configurations of species interspersed with short periods of change. I think we can see similar patterns in technology.

Let's start with the IBM PC. It arrived in 1981 and introduced a new age of computing. While preceded by a number of microcomputer systems (the Apple II, the Radio Shack TRS-80, the Commodore PET, and others) the IBM PC gained wide acceptance and set a new standard for computing hardware. The Combination of IBM PC and PC-DOS was the norm from its introduction until 1990 when Microsoft Windows replaced PC-DOS and more importantly, networks arrived.

The PC/Windows/network combination maintained dominance from 1990 until just recently. The PC mutated from a desktop device to a laptop device, and Windows changed from its early incarnation to the Windows-95 and later the Windows Vista "skin". Networks were the thing that really defined this era of computing.

We now have a new transition, from PC/Windows/network to tablet/cloud/wireless. Each transition requires new ideas for processing, storage, and user interfaces, and this transition is no exception. In the PC/DOS era, the user interface was text, the storage was local, and the processing was local. In the PC/Windows/network era, the user interface was graphical, the storage was networked (reliably), and the processing was local.

In the tablet/cloud/wireless era, the user interface is graphical and oriented to touch, the storage is networked (over an unreliable wireless network), and the processing is remote.

The tech for tablet/cloud/wireless is different from the previous age, and requires a different approach to programming and systems design. Processing in the cloud gives us more capacity; communicating over an unreliable network means that our systems must be opportunistic (process when you can) and patient (wait while you cannot).

The PC/DOS era stood for almost twenty years. So did the PC/Windows/network era. If that trend continues, the tablet/cloud/wireless era will run for about the same. Look for tablet/cloud/wireless to run from 2010 to 2030.