Technology loosens 20th-century ties - FutureScope: Top Execs Look Ahead - The Software Magazine 1995 Top 100 - Cover Story

Every few years the winds of change sweep through the computer industry, bringing new technologies that energize new classes of users, enable new applications, and stimulate growth. I've outlined several important technological developments that will occur over the next decade:

Talking about more generations. Between now and the turn of the century, at least two more generations of computers will come out of the lab and reach critical mass in the marketplace. Each will match the improved price/performance gains users have come to expect. That means the high-end desktop computer of the year 2000 will have, 1,000 Mips of processing power, gigabytes of memory, and enormous amounts of storage. SMP clusters of these powerful new processors will exponentially increase the processing power on the mainframes and departmental servers that run businesses.

Talk to us. The only real barrier to two-way verbal communication between people and computers today is the lack of sufficient processing power to handle continuous speech recognition and context assessment. Therefore, a share of this enormous new computer technology (power, memory and storage) will be used to change the way computers and people interact.

Communicating doesn't have to cost so much. A little-known fact about telecommunications is that communications capacity far exceeds demand. Artificially high prices stall the growth of information communications. As government wakes up to the idea that data communications is a driving force for economic growth, the cost of communications will fall until it ceases to be a major component of the cost equation.

As hardware and communications costs go down, we will see the costs associated with management of distributed resources become the primary inhibitor of growth. When the costs of distributed management outweigh the benefits of cost-effective and reliable communications, the movement toward distributed servers will reverse and organizations will quickly "recentralize" their corporate computing servers so they can be managed by smaller groups of people.

Untethered computing. While servers may move toward recentralization, the PC is going in the opposite direction -- so much so that, in the early part of the next centruy, it is more apt to look like a cellular phone than a laptop. Then, with our computers in hand, and immediate access to servers around the world, we'll be free to conduct business wherever we are.

The foundation for these future technologies is already in place. There is little doubt they will come about. What is in doubt is whether they will be used effectively. I estimate American businesses have wasted nearly a trillion dollars over the past three decades because technologists, rather than business people, have controlled the application of emerging technologies. Many technologists have ignored business reality and instead, played with the technology -- costing their employers huge sums of money.

Of course, senior executives want to revolutionize their businesses and want to use technology to gain competitive advantage. But there's a smart way to run a revolution and a stupid way. One of the tenets of intelligent technology revolution is that practical application of technology to meet business needs is the first priority.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Wiesner Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group