‘Sea Change’ in Technology

I have to assume that Bill Gates is a pretty smart guy. So when he says things like, there’s going to be a “sea change” in the software industry, I tend to take his word for it.

I have to credit my imminently intelligent friend Ian for first explaining to me the full impact of shifting software applications to being web-based. It’s an idea which has been around for a long time (since the inception of the client/server paradigm I would imagine), but it seems that the environment is finally becoming suitable to it actually happening.

The company which seems to be making the most of the web as a platform for delivering software applications is Google. And you can understand Microsoft’s reason for concern. Few companies have had the hyper-growth, the PR acclaim, the “street cred”, and the financial success of Google. They would keep me up at night if they were my competitor.

In thinking about the glorious future ahead, where we genetically modify babies to eradicate diseases and where swarms of nano-robots course through our blood stream fighting cancer and repairing cells, thinking about how the Intenet will change the world seems almost passe. But I defer to my buddy Bill to make the case that this really is a revolution.

Imagine it: anything you ever wanted to do with a computer… now possible. From anywhere. At any time. Oh, and of course it will all be free, because the actual application will be worth infinitely less than the advertising you can sell because the whole world comes to your site to do their word processing (and you couldn’t charge for it anyway because then you couldn’t compete with the open source alternatives that will be out there).

The bit that’s a little scary is the idea of keeping your data externally. Every Word file. Every PowerPoint. Every email and list of contacts and spreadsheet you ever made… all online.

The opportunity for a data-gobbling entity like Google are obvious. What is less obvious is the implications of what happens when one company owns the platform upon which a majority of the world’s data resides.

What would you do, with unlimited data at your fingertips?