The Changing I.T. Barbell (and what it means)

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 34 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

Information Technology, or I.T., often simply IT, has generally been a balance between central resources and the user.

In the mainframe era, the user had to be right next to the central computer to get anything out of it. I am actually old enough to remember standing around in a room, while a DEC minicomputer hummed under air conditioning nearby, waiting for a print-out to tell me if my feeble program had run. (It hadn't.) In response to this "output," I had to change my "input." I had to make new punch cards, on a typewriter, after editing my program on paper. With a pencil.

Local Area Networks, and the original Internet, gave people some distance from their computers in the 1970s. The creation of a standard user interface — a TV screen for output, a typewriter for input, floppies for storage  — helped. By 1979 I had a neighbor who had installed a $20,000 Cromemco in her living room, connected via phone lines to $5,000 terminals at employee homes, all typing court transcripts at $1 per printed page.

The LAN era got us through the 1980s, and the Internet was really an extension of that, only with different standards. The two ends of the barbell remained the same — a server in a room (sometimes a closet) on one end, a client on a TV with a typewriter on the other. The balance was constantly shifting, as first clients got more powerful, then servers.

By the turn of this century there were really three balance points on the barbell. There was still the TV-typewriter on one end, there was still the Internet on the other, but between there were "enterprise systems" of various sizes, ranging from managed server farms to simple servers in storage closets. All three parts of the system grew in size, complexity, and expense, for hardware, software, and services.

The last five years have seen a complete transformation of this balance.

WiFi and other wireless technologies untethered the client. You're no longer at a desk, in an office. Suddenly you can be in a coffee shop, or in an airport, and you're just as much at work as you were before. Going from wired to wireless was the first hint of what was to come.

Each one of the shifts above has been its own revolution, and the result now is a barbell that's weighted heavily to one side. The power of the client seems limited by the smaller size of the device which, while it appears to be doing more, is really just working with more complex files and so is actually doing less.

While everyone is paying attention to Apple, which controls the new client environment, most of the real change is happening in the network and server space. We don't notice this because much of what is happening in those latter two places is value destruction — more is being done for a lot less money than before.

But the most important point is what this does to society, to work life. I think it's very bearish for factories, and very bullish for campuses of all sorts, which can deliver high volumes of data to very mobile workforces. This should change how cities are designed, how and where people work and live, the whole society.

It also implies some immense changes on the energy front, because as work and life get closer, living grows closer to it, which saves energy. Clouds save energy. Clients like the iPad can be removed from the electricity grid altogether — they run on batteries that can be recharged by the Sun.

The changes being wrought by this new type of computing, in other words, go much deeper than anything that has happened since the birth of the mainframe. These are positive changes, but even positive changes can be wrenching to society. And, since America is the largest energy user in the world by far, these changes are more positive for America than for any other nation. (We also have the most advanced campus life of any other nation — another advantage.)

Those who are bearish on America have it completely wrong. Our best days as a nation are just beginning.