Connected Computing – how useful is your device without a network?

Ross Hill had a recent blog where he discussed that he finds no real use for a netbook. He has a laptop and a iPhone. His iPhone achieves 80% of what he needs to do, and the rest can wait till he is in front of his laptop. I totally agree, and in fact I recently bought a Dell Mini 9 Netbook, and I never use it! When heading out, I am asking myself the question; “will my iPhone be enough for today or should I pack my macbook too?”, I don’t ever think “hmm, do i need a small laptop, or a TINY laptop today as well as my iPhone….”

But in this discussion with Ross, I was reminded about some discussions I had a year ago, and that is, how useful are these machines, regardless if its an iPhone, netbook, or laptop, if I have no network connection? Pretty damn useless! As we get more and more accustomed to connected, cloud services. My iPhone would become little more than a pretty iPod, my macbook will become a word processor, and my netbook, well, it would remain even more turned off.

We have become so used to being connected to the internet, that we don’t realise how reliant we really are. A few years back I delivered a project for a large Australian Insurance company with over 7,000 users. Although email was a pivotal communication tool within the industry, they didn’t realise how reliant they were on it, until they lost it. The afternoon they lost email, 20% of the workforce went home (that’s not mentioning the ones that hung around and did nothing). Why did they go home? Because “what work can we do without email?” was the answer.

Soon after, the organisation recognised email as a Tier 1 It service and treated it accordingly. Another more real example of this pattern of reliance on the network happened more recently when I was at the Enterprise 2 show in Boston last year. We were talking about how important connectivity was to everybody, when a mysterious event occurred to prove the point. The room lost its Wifi! From a room of 300 people with 80% of their laptops open and twittering, blogging, searching, chatting and browsing, there was suddenly nothing. Laptops were closed and every one was paying attention to what was being said – just to prove my point (I swear I had nothing to do with the Wifi)!

As time goes on we become more reliant on these cloud/distributed services. I store documents on DropBox and MobileMe, I get email through Gmail, I backup through Mozy, my calendar is with Google, many of my online docs are Google Apps, and many business documents are stored in Wikis and Blogs in various places. Add to that, online project management tools, timesheeting, CRM etc, and I use my laptop for very little outside of writing code and working in Photoshop.

What interests me is the evolution, it has been a natural evolution from where we were to where we are. Technology has evolved from mainframes, to minis, micros, laptops and now netbooks. But lets think about where the data is, and take a simple Document example;

Pre-computing era, the document was a physical piece of paper I held in my hand, it then become digital and stored on a floppy disc I could hold. From here it was stored on a hard drive in my computer, then it was stored on a hard drive on a network device (possibly in the same building), and finally we are now storing it in the cloud on the other side of the planet, or somewhere we don’t care about. This document is getting physically further and further away from me.

The important thing here is that I now no longer really care where it is being stored, as long as I can get to it when I need to. Whether it is stored in my computer the same building as me or on the other side of the world, I don’t care.

So, where is this heading? We will obviously soon see more ubiquitous storage solutions where we really don’t care where the file is. I have documents on MobileMe and DropBox, but I have no idea where they physically are, and the experience is seamless to me. My iDisk appears like any other drive, and DropBox acts like a folder on my Mac. I add documents into DropBox and they disappear off my desktop as if the folder I put them in was on my physical machine, and I could be sharing that folder with someone on a different network across the other side of the world.

I also believe that we are going to see more of a pattern of distributed computing, and there is tinkering going on at the moment. There is much to be said about the SETI@home project & Folding@home, and these projects are exploiting the fact that we are using the cloud more and our machines are under utilised. But what is stopping technology evolving to used shared storage? Nothing, its here today. Its called BitTorrent.

But why stop there? Why stop at sharing files? Or why stop at sharing files that only have a high demand? Why can’ I store my personal documents in the same way?

So here are a couple of parting thoughts. Firstly, use similar technologies as mentioned above to allow me to have infinite (or close to) storage, by allowing me store my documents on the internet, but using other individual’s machines, the files may propagate across several machines so that there is backup and redundancy. I can get to my personal files, anywhere, anytime, and I will always get the shortest and quickest path to it. Any updates, again propagate across to other machines. We are seeing a similar and interesting model with Source Code Control in Mercurial and GIT. Solve the security issue (not a major issue), and there is something there. Realistically, most users have an obscene amount of data capacity that they never realise their full potential (I have about 3TB across 2 desktops, a laptop, and several external drives, that is probably 20% used – there are so many duplicate files).

The second thought is around the use of CPU cycles, and how this helps distributed/connected computing. As already highlighted (and by others), CPUs are well under utilised. So why not tap into it (like the @home projects) but for all users, how do we do this? The limitation is still with the browser. The few functions that I still do on my laptop are; photo/image editing in Photoshop, video editing in various tools, and writing code in various IDEs. Although there is some great progress in online tools to replace these, none come even close, particularly for a power user. Once there is new models introduced so that applications can ‘really’ be developed in the browser, then we can really head down this path.

I can see the day, that I can sit at any computer, open up the browser, that is actually acting like a true operating system, and I can get to project files on a remote location (maybe on someone else’s machine), and then I can start editing, compiling the code, writing applications,  and finally deploying the application. And everything is remote. I may even be doing this on my 5th Gen iPhone.

I find it intriguing to think where we are heading, there is so much power sitting out there in  our machines, that we are not tapping into, and there is so much opportunity to embrace it.  But this is all becoming more and more reliant on the network available to us. What do you think?

Please leave comment or chat with meon twitter @snaglepus