

Why Thomas Watson was right. - phlux

Head of IBM, Thomas Watson, is famously quoted as saying that "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers," -- while the veracity of the quote may be in question, it may in fact be largely true.<p>As all things do, the computing industry operates in cycles. We have seen the original monolithic machines used in the past for trajectory calculations grow, become big blue mainframes and shrink again to minis, the PC and now our mobile devices.<p>Currently, the computing powers of our civilization have fractured into millions of devices, billions of processors and trillions of transactions.<p>The sales channels and profits from the various big vendors are mind boggling and competition is fierce and a joy to behold.<p>But this is now.<p>Mr. Watson's quote (we'll just go ahead and give him credit, regardless), that there is only a market for <i>maybe</i> 5 computers was just 75 to 100 years too early... and lacked detail.<p>Cycles. The industry operates in cycles - everything is fractal. The big bang of our industry showered the planet in bits - thought, information, ideas, math, technology.... life quickly changing the fabric of humanity permanently. In a very short time, our world has changed - from Watson's piano peddling to farmers just a generation or so ago, through his leadership at IBM to now having the ability nearly instantly hear the last tweets of a celebrated director before his demise in a war torn region of the globe most of us would otherwise never think about.<p>The vast explosion of available technology upon the globe, and our lives looks massive, wide, diverse. So many different and varying options -- different colors, speed, screen sizes etc... there are literally too many options to pick from.<p>We form factions around the implementations we like, build entire businesses and careers on our choice and preference of design.<p>But in the end, we are all fighting over singular components. Not systems, not computers - but sensors.<p>The real value in everything we do, as an industry, and ultimately as a race and civilization, is in the data. The information. The creation, development and manifestation of our thoughts and knowledge.<p>Our relationships with one another, further our ability to communicate - digitally rebuild the tower of babel.<p>To these ends, we are seeing a collapsing of computing. The scale, complexity, power and capabilities growing, as Moore predicted, into perpetuity - but the <i>idea</i> of computing is collapsing again.<p>Collapsing to make Mr. Watson not only right, but prophetic.<p>In less than 10 years, we have seen a tiny online bookseller and a DVD mail-rental service literally redefine and set the direction for the entire industry.<p>Certainly, like today's outage, there are issues. But those are human issues; our design was wrong, our implementation had faults, something failed somewhere which caused a brief outage which seemed massive at the time - but in the larger picture is but a minor growing pain on the path towards the singularity.<p>Right now, we see the path for the current titans of our industry as they battle to maintain their dominance - but in the next ten to twenty years, the landscape will be exactly as Watson predicted.<p><i>Maybe</i> five major computers. Each with trillions of sensors - all providing utility to their hundreds of millions of users.<p>Layer upon layer, built up in a global representation of the OSI - but even that model lacks enough layers to now accurately describe the scale and complexity of the worlds major compute powers.<p>The major computers of the world will be the future iterations of facebook, google, amazon, microsoft and apple.<p>These will be the physical computing behemoths upon which 90% of our digital existence will be built.<p>Entire cities of nodes, components, little bits of the digital fractal that has become the outward expression of all human informational consciousness - continually receiving updates via the trillions of sensors carried by every person and thing in the world.<p>These several ultra-compute-platforms will host the myriad of layered services and applications that are required for modern civilizations existence, providing us with seamless access to every bit we require from mundane to sublime.<p>They themselves will become even more interwoven, relying on each others services, infrastructure and users to survive.<p>Take a step back, abstract yourself from the seemingly separate nature of our reality. The device in front of you is not standalone. It never was, and it never could be. It is simply a component of a much larger, way more complex representation of its idea.<p>In years times, we may again find dear Watson was wrong. There was never a market for maybe five computers -- there is really only a market for one, but that one will be built supported and used through innumerable lenses represented by countless companies all building a tiny piece of a giant, global, single machine.<p>---<p>(First draft, stream of conscious inspired by todays Amazon outage.)
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arctangent
It's an interesting idea but I completely disagree.

Example 1: I own four personal computers and operate two virtual machines in
the cloud (with two different providers). I don't ever see me owning fewer
computers. I will always want at least one machine completely under my control
with guaranteed resource availability, regardless of connectivity to the
internet.

Example 2: The place where I work has computers too. Lots and lots of them.
For legal and governance reasons we're not to run our infrastructure
externally.

I actually think that the number of providers of commoditised mass computing
and infrastructure is going to increase over time as computers become more
powerful. Right now it's tricky to operate at vast computational scale because
of the amount of capital investment required, the sheer number of machines
required, and the staff required to supervise them.

In the future I think we'll approach a point where there are "chips with
everything" and buying computer cycles above and beyond what's embedded in
your jewellery (or your skull) will be as simple as bidding a certain amount
(or buy-it-now!) and firing off a long-running task into the compute-market.

I really can't see a situation in which a small number of players will be able
to dominate over the long term. Even companies like Facebook who currently
have a huge edge due to the network effects of their large memberships will
lose market share as commoditised services spring up to replace them.

~~~
phlux
The leap I am making in my little story is that one would stop to think of
your personal machines and your virtual machines as "computers".

Taken in the context of IBM's Watson's perspective at the time, he was looking
at the computer as an enormous, extremely complex and costly purpose built
device, for say, munitions trajectory calculations.

How many of those can we sell?

Now look at the "computer" as an enormous, extremely complex and costly
purpose built device, for say, hosting all the applications made for mobile
access.

and the analogy holds.

Start to think of your personal machine simply as a sensor (it senses and
collects data that you produce, and ships that data to the hosted applications
in the cloud)

The fact that, itself, is a fractal representation of everything that is
occurring in the cloud - that it is, indeed, a computer, doesn't matter.

It is a sensor. A very powerful, complex one.

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edw
Is this another one of Sokal's submissions to _Social Text_? Is that you,
Alan?

