Buy Microsoft Office Home & StudentI've been an IT industry analyst for almost 10 years. I've seen many technologies come, go, or fail to even arrive in the first place. However, during that time, a few techs have emerged that play a big part in fundamentally defining how businesses do computing. Most first emerged prior to 2000, but it has been during the past decade that they've truly changed things.
1. x86 processors were already well entrenched in corporate computing by the end of the 1990s, especially in their role as the "(In)tel" part of "Wintel" servers running Windows NT. However, their dominant designer and manufacturer, Intel, was heading in a different direction to handle the inevitable transition to the 64-bit processors and operating systems needed to keep pace with growing memory requirements.
That new direction was Itanium, a clean sheet processor design by Intel and Hewlett-Packard intended to get away from all the legacy features of x86 and--not incidentally--cut the x86-compatible processor makers out of the picture. The Itanium family remains with us but primarily as a processor for high-end HP servers. It was AMD that first added 64-bit extensions to x86 but Intel felt compelled to follow. And it was this backwardly compatible version of x86 that is the mainstream 64-bit server processor, not Itanium.
2. The other big processor story of the decade is multicore. Near the end of 2000, Intel introduced the Pentium 4 processor based on the NetBurst microarchitecture. It was intended to eventually hit about 10GHz. In fact, it never got beyond 4GHz and came to be viewed as the last gasp of performance scaling through frequency.
AMD introduced its first multicore x86 Opteron processors for servers in 2005 which helped it gain market share for a time while Intel made major changes to its development plans and processes. IBM and Sun also aggressively pursued multi-core in their RISC lines. Specialty processors such as Azul's Vega and Tilera's TILE lines went even more radically multicore. In short, frequency is largely dead as a path to higher system performance, which will require a combination of more cores and specialty accelerators working in parallel.
3. When I first met Diane Greene, co-founder and then-CEO of VMware in the fall of 2000, VMware was already selling a product to developers that let them run multiple operating systems on a single workstation. But Diane was in town to pitch me on something new, a pair of new server virtualization products--GSX and ESX Server--that made it possible to consolidate multiple workloads on a single physical server and to provision them more quickly.
The basic concept goes all the way back to IBM's involvement with early developments in time-shared computing in Cambridge, Mass., during the early '60s. And all the RISC/Unix vendors of the time had their own approaches to slicing and dicing servers. However, it was VMware that brought server virtualization to the masses. Its product ran on standard x86 servers and it provided a way to consolidate workloads right at a time when IT purchases were dramatically slowing and anything that could save money was in vogue.
EMC bought VMware in 2003 for $635 million, a figure which it's hard to believe today was widely viewed as an overpayment. Today, server virtualization--an area where VMware remains the 800-lb. gorilla despite Microsoft's entry--continues to fundamentally change the way IT departments think about operating their data centers. Virtualization also underpins much of cloud computing, another major developing trend.
4. Linux and other open source were a big part of the dot-com and service provider build-out of the late 1990s.
But enterprises? Not so much. This 2001 research note had to argue that Linux was, in fact, ready for serious production use. And, whether "ready for the enterprise" is a meaningful question in the abstract, the fact remains that the Linux 2.4 kernel was widely regarded as the first version deserving of that description and it wasn't released until mid-2000. IBM began its big Linux push at about the same time.
Thus, I'd argue that it's been this past decade and not the prior one that has seen Linux and open source truly become a pervasive part of computing. That's not to say that open-source has replaced all other software. But it has heavily influenced how companies do development, engage with user and developer communities, and provide access to their products--even when the software in question is proprietary.
5. My last entry has the greatest overlap with the consumer space. That's not a coincidence, given that mobile devices are a very visible example of what Citrix CEO Mark Templeton calls the "comsumerization of IT."
Mobile devices encompass at least a couple of different things. The most obvious entrant is probably the smartphone--first in the guise of the BlackBerry and more recently the iPhone. We are now at the point where you can carry a bona-fide computer in your pocket, complete with GPS and other sensors, and can run applications that you install. As my colleague Jonathan Eunice has noted, it really is a transformational experience relative to, say, my older Treo. It also represents the reality of the modern smartphone that, for many, it's increasingly about mail, texting, and social media and not, you know, phoning.
However, the smartphone doesn't deserve all the limelight. The noughts have also seen the laptop computer transform. I'm not talking about the form factor so much--although Netbooks have gotten their share of attention. Rather I'm talking about the way that we can use them.
I've had laptops since the 1990s but it wasn't until about 2001 that conferences and other venues started to put up Wi-Fi networks. They worked fitfully (some things haven't changed as much as we might like), but this was the beginning of the connected laptop rather than the merely mobile laptop.
And that's why I see the smartphone and the laptop as part of the same mega-trend. It's not about a particular form factor or usage model. It's about (almost) always being connected to applications that increasingly live largely in the network.
Computing is cheap. Both by historical standards and compared to many other machines and services that we purchase. All of us appreciate that intellectually at some level. But, when it comes to thinking about which devices make sense and which don't, it often seems as if we're treating computing like it's a scarce and expensive resource.
I see this tendency again and again when discussions turn to new types of devices or software such as Google's Chrome OS. I often get asked when will a certain shiny-new-thing replace desktops running Windows or some other existing gadget.
Far more often, the better lens to use is whether the newness fills a legitimate need for some group of potential users, whether or not it takes the place of something that already exists. That's because it just isn't a big deal to add an incremental device to our entourage.
This is not to say that we want to mindlessly proliferate stuff. There's a "care and feeding" aspect to electronics. This is especially true as we move towards general purpose computers with their incessant appetite for updates and upgrades. Mobile gizmos of all sorts also need their chargers and cables and their data needs to sync with other devices in individualistic ways. Especially in mobile, we're willing to tolerate sub-optimizations to reduce personal clutter. For a lot of people, the current generation of smartphones can replace a dedicated cell phone, a BlackBerry, MP3 player, camera, e-book reader, and even a GPS.
But I think we collectively expect more convergence to happen than does, in fact, occur. There are just so many design compromises and trade-offs associated with using one device for multiple tasks.
Even in the mobile arena, any halfway serious photographer will want a separate camera. Someone who wants to do a lot of reading will probably prefer something with a larger screen than a pocketable smartphone. And, while Google's GPS application for Android sounds really interesting for occasional use while traveling, with dedicated GPS units starting under $100 I'd probably go that route if this was a device I wanted to use all the time.
In the home, the so-called "3-foot" versus "10-foot" experience is one thing that keeps devices separate. Standard keyboards and mice don't fit well with the 10-foot living room experience, yet entering all but the most limited amount of text is essentially impossible without them. The user interfaces and applications for this setting have correspondingly evolved to involve simple pointing and clicking with a minimum of typing.
But it's more than a case of having different types of devices for different purposes. That assumes that each computer serves a unique purpose.
In fact, there's no more particular reason to limit the number of computers around a house than there is to limit the number of clocks. This will be ever more the case as prices come further down, our applications and data increasingly live in the network, and we'll start to see devices that are optimized to be complementary to a main computer or computers.
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them.
This old saw is arguably less true than in years past. Today, for a lot of reasons, there's more pressure to reach agreement on one way to do a certain thing. (Think the HD DVD vs. Blu-ray debacle for an example of what happens when vendors can't agree on a single approach.)
Standards aren't a single thing. Some have been blessed with the appropriate incantations by some official or quasi-official body. Others come from an industry consortium. And still others are "de facto" (or at least began life that way)--the result of a dominant company or just a default way of doing things.
The purist will argue that just being widely used doesn't make something a standard. I agree up to a point and only use the "standard" term in this case for things for are truly ubiquitous. Contrariwise, a rigorous formal ratification process is no guarantee of success.
But some standards do win big and become part of just how IT gets done. Here are some of them.
Like many other successful standards, Ethernet has remained a fixture in local area networks for so many years in part by adapting to many successive waves of technology. First developed in the famous Xerox PARC labs in the mid-1970s, it initially ran over coaxial cable but soon moved to twisted pair cable with the 10 Mbit/second generation. 10 Gbit/second Ethernet is now starting to roll out along with a variety of additions to the specification that make it more suitable as a high-performance unified fabric.
Ethernet's initial success resulted in no small part from coordinated standardization efforts beginning in the IEEE. This helped it beat out alternatives, most notably IBM's Token Ring. Over time, Ethernet's ubiquity and the cost benefits provided by this volume helped it largely stave off server interconnect challengers. InfiniBand has had wins in high-performance computing and certain other clustering applications, but it didn't displace Ethernet as a "server area network" as early promoters had hoped.
PCI, Peripheral Component Interconnect, had its beginnings as an Intel-developed bus for connecting internal cards within systems. The version 1.0 spec came out in 1992. Given the ubiquity of PCI these days, it's easy to forget that it only replaced a plethora of other busses both standardized and proprietary in x86 and, later, large Unix servers based on other processors over the course of nearly a decade.
Nor was the process steady. Although PCI was initially introduced in part to replace the VESA Local Bus for graphics cards--which it eventually did--PCI was itself replaced by AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) for a time prior to the PCI Express generation.
PCI Express makes for an interesting case study in the marketing of standards. With technology bumping up against the limits of parallel I/O busses like conventional PCI, the Arapahoe Working Group--spearheaded by Intel--started pushing a new serial interconnect standard in about 2001. Arapahoe's success was by no means pre-ordained. AMD's HyperTransport was one alternative among several.
Arapahoe required hardware that was largely different from PCI but it was compatible with PCI's software model in a number of respects. And this was enough to get Arapahoe adopted by the keeper of the PCI standard, the PCI-SIG, and get the SIG's imprimatur on what would now be called PCI Express. And that helped make it the obvious heir to PCI. Names matter. (Here's a more detailed accounting of PCI Express and its history.)
It's easy to forget just how painful it could be, in the years before USB (Universal Serial Bus), to connect external peripherals to a computer system. RS-232, a long-used and successful standard in its own right, was the most common way. It was also a way that could easily devolve into examinations of cable pin-outs, interrupt channels, and memory addresses.
USB was a cooperative effort by a group of large technology vendors who founded a non-profit corporation to manage the specification. Version 1.0 was introduced in 1996. Now up to version 3.0, USB has become the standard way to connect external peripherals to PCs; it's also commonly used on servers for devices such as printers.
There's a spec for wireless USB but, like other standards intended to connect peripherals to computers wirelessly, it's never taken off. The current such "personal area network" getting the most buzz is My WiFi from Intel.
USB's primary competition has been FireWire, Apple's name for IEEE 1394. Unlike USB, it does not need a host computer and is faster than the USB 2.0 generation. However, it didn't catch on widely in the computer industry outside of Apple (which is phasing it out in favor of USB) and video equipment.
TCP/IP refers to the combination of two protocols: Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol. Together, they are among the most important pieces of software underpinning the Internet which transitioned to using TCP/IP in 1983. Work on TCP began under the auspices of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) a decade earlier but, along the way, the software stack was re-architected to add IP as the early Internet grew.
Like many of the Internet's building blocks, TCP/IP was firmly entrenched before commercial interests got involved to any significant degree and, indeed, before most of the world at large had any real notion of the Internet's existence. The general public came to know the Internet through the World Wide Web, an outgrowth of Tim Berners-Lee's development of HTML at CERN, in the 1990s. Thus HTML, as well, is a key standard.
At the time that TCP/IP was gaining momentum, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) spearheaded a large project to standardize networking. The "OSI model" remains the standard way to think about layers of the networking stack. If you talk about a switch being "Layer 4," you're using OSI terminology. But the specific protocols developed to go with the model were never widely used. (TCP/IP largely maps to the layers defined in the OSI model.)
The x86 architecture is perhaps the canonical example of a de facto standard driven primarily by a single vendor: Intel. Microsoft Windows is also in the running, but it was very arguably x86's ubiquity in a segment of the market open to relatively low-cost packaged software that made the rise of Windows possible. Over the past decade, AMD has also driven x86 innovations--most notably 64-bit extensions. However, it was Intel that had the biggest hand in shifting the industry from a structure in which each company did everything from fabricating processors to writing operating systems to developing databases to one in which different companies tend to specialize in one part of the technology ecosystem.
x86 emerged as a dominant chip architecture for a variety of reasons. IBM designed Intel's 8088 into the first important business PC. It got this win and others at a time when the world was rapidly computerizing. And Intel optimized itself to ride key technology trends while divesting itself of businesses, such as memory, as they commoditized.
Finally, here are a few others that could make a list like this one:
Wi-Fi played a big role in making personal computers more mobile--which is why Intel pushed it so hard.
VGA is the computing video standard that finally helped merge a rather splintered landscape and had a good long reign. (The latest video interconnect trend is a shift to HDMI--representing a coming together of computing and consumer electronics standards.)
SCSI was the first storage interconnect to merge in a big way a disparate set of existing connection schemes, both proprietary and more or less standardized. However, storage has remained an area where different standards are used for different purposes. That's changing to a degree with SATA, however, which we now see in both PCs and data centers.
More and more of our computing happens through applications and Web sites out in the network. It's in the "cloud" to use the current trendy lingo.
One consequence is that we're starting to look at our clients differently. That's because they're increasingly a sort of window into the cloud rather than devices that run a lot of application-specific code and store a lot of application-specific data locally. Clients can therefore be "thinner," which is to say loaded with less software and less tailored to the needs and wants of a given user. Resources and customization live out in the network instead.
Even with more conventional operating systems such as Windows, Linux, or OS X, running applications in the network reduces the time spent installing and upgrading applications on our proliferating collection of clients. Google's Chrome OS takes the concept to the next level and essentially reimagines the client OS for a cloud world.
However, the real world is messier and more complicated than "Just run everything in a browser." That's true today and will almost certainly be true to at least some degree next month and next year. Ultimately, this question of how thin clients can become as a practical matter is going to play a big role in how accepted certain models of computing will become.
To illustrate, consider a PC that is today mostly used to go online. There's more than just an OS and a basic browser involved.
There are plug-ins and extensions for the browser. There's probably an IM client; Meebo is a Web-based alternative but most people run a local client. If you use Twitter, there's a good chance you run an application like TweetDeck or Seesmic, which may in turn require Adobe's AIR runtime. Third-party media applications such as Apples iTunes are commonplace. Google Earth, Windows Live Writer...This list goes on--and will vary by user--of the applications and components that have to be installed and updated for even a rather bare-bones PC configuration.
And that's before we even broach device drivers or other software that may be required to connect a camera, a microphone, or some other peripheral.
My overarching point here is not that a thinner client model is uninteresting. I strongly believe that it is meant not to replace traditional fat clients but to augment them. Today, I have a notebook that is essentially used only to go online yet I still have all the administration associated with a full-blown PC.
However, the challenge for Google and others is to steer a course that creates an "Internet computer" that is legitimately better in that role than a full-fledged PC while retaining sufficient customization. Application stores may be part of the answer. HTML 5 will likely also help by making browsers more capable of running applications.
Whatever the specific technical solutions though, the answer will involve a lot of careful thought about balancing simplification and flexibility.
Although VMware got its start with a desktop virtualization product aimed at developers, the company today is best known for bringing server virtualization to the mainstream.
Creating multiple virtual servers on a single physical system lets IT departments consolidate applications onto fewer computers and thereby cut costs. Over time, server virtualization has also enabled a variety of products and approaches that can simplify IT operations and generally make data centers more flexible.
VMware has continued to invest in virtualization aimed at the client. This includes client-side hypervisors such as its original VMware Workstation product. However, products and technologies associated with delivering applications and user desktops to the client are really the main focus.
Application and desktop delivery sometimes makes use of client hypervisors but it's a largely separate category of technology that's fundamentally about centrally managing user applications and/or operating-system images. In VMware's case, virtualized desktops fall under the VMware View name.
On Monday, VMware announced VMware View 4, the latest version of its virtual desktop portfolio.
Much of VMware's development focus with View 4 was in the area of the user experience--that is, making applications and desktops delivered from a central location perform with the same responsiveness and fidelity as if they were installed on a local PC, in the usual way.
Historically, this user experience has been one of the stumbling blocks for desktop virtualization in general. Older forms of Citrix Presentation Server (now rebadged and modernized under the XenApp label) and initial virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) implementations very much tried to simplify management and otherwise deliver direct benefits for IT operations. Whether users liked using the products was secondary.
As a result, desktop virtualization has been mostly something used by what are often called "task workers." Think call centers and other groups of users with specific jobs to do and not much say about the tools they use to do it. In general, desktop virtualization promoters have focused too much on delivering benefits to IT and not enough on delivering benefits to users. (They've also arguably paid too little attention to keeping up-front costs down and relied too much on promises of soft cost savings down the road.)
One of the technology pieces that VMware is leaning on to improve user experience is the PC over Internet Protocol (PCoIP). PCoIP was originally developed by Teradici to improve the responsiveness and display quality of virtual desktops. However, in Teradici's initial implementation, specialized hardware was needed on both ends of the wire. This effectively made it a premium solution for situations in which cost wasn't a factor, such as for financial traders and government agencies for which security considerations are paramount.
VMware has worked with Teradici to create a software-only version of the protocol. Desktop virtualization Chief Technology Officer Scott Davis goes into a lot of the details on his blog.
It's a User Datagram Protocol-based server-side protocol that transmits compressed bitmaps or frames to the remote client. This has the advantage of being able to make real-time adjustments to account for the available bandwidth and latency of the communications channel; the display quality degrades, if there isn't enough bandwidth but things still "work."
Although details differ, there are similarities to Sun's Appliance Link Protocol--which is well-regarded for its ability to deal with poor-quality connections. (A downside of server-side protocols is that they consume processing horsepower on the server, where it tends to be more expensive, rather than on the client.)
VMware will continue to support other remote display protocols, most notably Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol. However, VMware is clearly positioning PCoIP as its favored technology and a point of competitive differentiation for VMware View in general.
Also in the graphics area, View 4 adds "multimonitor, adaptive display support--resolution optimization for each monitor, with an option to pivot and rotate the display output, supporting rich audio and video content with increased performance."
Other user experience enhancements generally relate to better integration with the overall desktop environment. For example, View Printing automatically discovers local printers without the need to install print drivers. View Limited Access provides a single point of authentication across VMware View environments, Windows Terminal Servers, Blade PCs, and remote physical PCs.
VMware View 4 comes in two editions. The Enterprise Edition includes the basics: VSphere 4 (the back-end server virtualization product), VCenter 4 (management), and View Manager 4 (for provisioning user access). It's priced at $150 per concurrent connection.
The $250-per-concurrent-user Premier Edition adds ThinApp 4 (for delivering ad hoc applications that aren't part of a master image) and View Composer (for managing images), both capabilities that would typically be desired in a large or sophisticated deployment.
VMware as a whole approaches the world from the perspective of the enterprise data center. Delivering desktops from that data center was somewhat of a sideshow. Is it now as focused on application delivery as, say, Citrix? Not really. But that said, desktop virtualization has moved beyond the sideshow stage at VMware.
We've been hearing a lot about thinner client devices of late. Netbooks are a hot topic, whether or not they're really a distinct category of device. I've wondered if there might not be a role for a sort of ebook-on-steroids. And Google's Chrome OS, pitched for a browser-centric world, had the digerati all in a flutter a few weeks back.
A lot of this activity reflects a general move away from software that is locally installed and run on a traditional PC to software and services housed on servers out on the network--in the cloud, to use the lingo du jour. It's enabled in no small part by increasingly pervasive networks including wireless ones of various kinds.
However, although cloud computing tracks improvements in networks, it doesn't necessarily sync up so cleanly with the parallel improvements going on in computers themselves. As a commenter put it in a recent post of mine: "The thing that I don't understand about the move to "cloud-based services" is that it seems at odds with Moore's Law. Specifically, devices are going to have more & more processing power, disk space & memory - why would you want to offload processing to the cloud?"
This is a deceptively deep comment and one that touches a lot of basic architectural questions about how we will run software and where we will run it.
One thought is that we're not really running counter to Moore's Law. Rather, we're moving the increased number of transistors that Moore's Law gives us from the client to the server. We're making clients thinner (and therefore more portable, cooler, and so forth) and the servers fatter.
There's some truth in that with mobile phones perhaps offering the clearest illustration.
But, for more notebook-like clients there's a lot of processor and graphics horsepower on the local computer that's going to waste much of the time. And, in any case, telecommunications infrastructure places hard limits on bandwidth for a given time of place, but we can dial up and down our local compute horsepower by selecting devices with different characteristics. So it makes more sense to favor local processing much of the time.
In fact, the fundamental thing that thinner clients and cloud computing tackle isn't really the movement of computing off the client but rather the movement of "state" off the client--which is to say data, applications, and customizations specific to a given user.
As a practical matter, most clients still store some amount of state. In the days of old, terminals didn't store anything locally. Sun's Sun Ray line comes closest to replicating this experience in modern thin clients. However, even browsers store cookies and can be configured with extensions and plug-ins that will vary from one installation to the next.
And, for most purposes, this is probably a reasonable enough state of affairs. Our personal devices are personal anyway; we just want to get away from having to load and manage custom software for each individual task that we want to do. Shared, public clients are a different matter, of course. However, in this case, a lowest-common-denominator software load (such as a browser) is typically sufficient.
There is clearly a lot of work left to do and battles, both technical and political, left to fight to arrive at the best architectural models and programming practices for this new generation of client-server computing. For example, do "rich Internet applications" live in the browser a la Microsoft's Silverlight or is a separate framework such as Adobe's AIR a better approach? Where do .NET and Java fit in?
These (and many others) are not small questions. Application writers need to understand at a very granular level the environment for which they're writing. And there is very much a tension between richness of the client experience and the degree to which we can standardize and simplify that client.
There's a bit of an anti-Netbooks meme making the rounds in blogs and on Twitter and the expected push-back from their fans. From where I sit, this is fueled partially by the conflating of product and product category, partially by competitive sniping, and partially by genuine consumer confusion. Let me try to tease those threads apart.
I've been skeptical from pretty much the beginning that there was a bright line distinction between Netbooks and other inexpensive, small form-factor notebooks. And it's this lack of a truly standalone category that analyst Michael Gartenberg is writing about in his provocatively titled "Netbooks R.I.P."
"What's in a name?" Shakespeare asked, adding "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." While some perceive the netbook as a new product category -- a class of device that's never existed -- I would have to beg to differ. A netbook is merely a laptop with the pivotal axis based on price first and foremost... Sure, my price-oriented definition might sound heretical to those who view the netbook as an ode to cloud computing, ubiquitous usage scenarios, and freedom from Microsoft OS tyranny, but that's not how the market has shaped out.
The current generation of Netbooks tends to have certain defining characteristics--specifically Intel Atom processors and the Windows XP (or Linux). But, as Gartenberg notes, a 7-inch screen also used to be a defining characteristic. Now many Netbooks come with 10-inch screens. Come Windows 7 and future processor generations from Intel (and AMD), I expect any clear distinctions that exist today to rapidly blur.
That's not to say that analysts and product managers won't create a bucket for small, price-focused notebooks. They may call that bucket "Netbooks." They may call it "Value Ultraportables." They may call it "Fred."
IT industry people like to chop markets into named categories for reasons of their own, even if as a fellow analyst said at a recent meeting: "the average consumer calls everything a laptop anyway."
One reason that the nomenclature fight around Netbooks is more intense than such battles tend to be is that the distinction between Netbooks and other ultra-portable notebooks is also a fault line in a competitive battle between Intel and AMD.
For Intel, Netbooks have been the big product category win for its Atom processor. (If a somewhat serendipitous win. Atom was originally more focused on a new class of "Mobile Internet Devices" (MID), a product category that so far hasn't taken off.) For its part, AMD has focused on an incrementally higher price and processing power point with its Athlon Neo platform (found in the HP dv2).
As a result, it's in Intel's interests to promote Netbooks as something new that is both apart from and incremental to the notebooks that use higher-end (and higher dollar) Intel parts. At the same time, it's in AMD's interest to denigrate Netbooks as underpowered and not real PCs.
Finally, there is a continuing trickle of evidence, such as this NPD Group report, suggesting that consumer satisfaction with Netbooks isn't all that great.
Like James Robertson, this latest report struck me as a bit curious. Many of the people I know with Netbooks are almost excessively fond of them. However, it's fair comment that most of the people I know as also geeks, are attracted to the new and different, and understand what a Netbook class of device can do--and what it can't. It doesn't stretch credulity to imagine less educated consumers taking a $300 notebook home and then being dissatisfied because it's not a general replacement for a $1,000 notebook.
Highly portable notebooks without the road warrior premiums historically associated with portability are a great advance for consumers. But I'm also excited about the devices that new screen technologies and widespread wireless connectivity could enable. The possibilities in this space are great. Netbooks are just a flavor of notebook.
One of the questions related to client computing that I've been exploring of late is whether we're likely to see a mainstream mobile device or devices emerge between a smartphone and an ultra-portable notebook.
My Illuminata colleague Jonathan Eunice and I debated this subject on a video recently--mostly in the context of long battery life, instant on/off mini-notebooks of various sorts. The HP Jornada 820 of the late 1990s is one possible prototype for such a device, suitably updated for a wirelessly connected world. The stillborn Palm Foleo is another take.
I'm perhaps more skeptical than my colleague that we'll see the right intersection of technologies, costs, and use cases to support a mainstream mobile--but not pocketable--computer that's not a full notebook but has other attributes that make it compellingly better for people on the go.
(This is the point where someone jumps up and yells "NETBOOKS!" To which my response is that Netbooks are not really a category. Leaving aside for the nonce an apparent weakening of their most faddish popularity, Netbooks are really just cheap notebooks. Low price is their distinguishing feature, not battery life or anything else that makes them particularly suited to throwing in a backpack. Even their weight is little different from the best of the ultraportable notebooks.)
Of course, in a sense, we have lots of tweeners today. We have digital cameras, portable gaming consoles such as the Nintendo DS, and e-ink based e-book readers like Amazon's Kindle. But these are all optimized for very specific purposes; they're in no sense general purpose computers or even subsets of computers optimized for mobility.
However, a recent post by ZDNet's Jason Perlow "Forget Kindle DX. How about the ZuneBook?" got me thinking. Might some form of tablet one day be a tweener of choice?
Let me be crystal clear about one point. I'm not talking about tablet PCs as we know them today. They have their adherents but most people find that it's hard to use them for many of the things that PCs are good for (like writing using a keyboard) while simultaneously carrying over notebook baggage such as weight, relatively short battery life, longish boot times, and so forth.
Rather I'm thinking of something that is physically thin, light, easy to read in sunlight, instant on/off, multitouch screen, wirelessly connected using both Wi-Fi and cellular networks, and about the size of an 8.5-inch by 11-inch pad of paper. I imagine a software environment that isn't necessarily general purpose but could be extended to at least some degree. Google Android or Windows Mobile might be possibilities. Think of it as an e-book reader on steroids.
Such a device isn't possible today even if you leave out the question of what it would cost if it could theoretically be built. The display is the real killer. A color, e-paper, multitouch display is a few years out. OLEDs will improve on existing LCDs on several dimensions--notably, in this context, battery life and thickness. However, OLED technology still doesn't get you to the same easy-on-the-eyes-even-in-sunlight point and all-day-plus battery life as e-paper.
But it seems an interesting direction for device makers to explore. Once the foundation technologies are available, it's something that could deliver qualitatively different experiences than either a pocketable smartphone or a notebook with a keyboard. And that's the sort of compelling differentiation that a tweener device will need to make it big.
LAS VEGAS--The Day One keynotes at Citrix Synergy 2009 were about users and desktops. Today was nominally about data centers and clouds--of which there were a variety of announcements. However, Citrix's XenClient ("Project Independence") loomed large as well.
Of the products discussed on stage, XenClient is perhaps furthest from being a fully realized product. But is also offers an intriguing window into how the PC as we know it is likely to fundamentally change over the coming years.
XenClient is a "Type 1" native hypervisor that sits on a PC and hosts one or more guest operating systems. This approach contrasts with the "Type 2" hosted hypervisors that are far more common on PCs today.
There are good reasons why we tend to see native hypervisors on servers and hosted hypervisors on desktops. Native hypervisors are higher performance, especially when it comes to interacting with networks and disks. As a result, it wasn't until native hypervisors like VMware ESX Server and Xen came to market that x86 virtualization started to seriously move beyond useful but relatively narrow uses such as in test and development labs.
The downside of native hypervisors is that, because they sit directly on top of a system's hardware, they have to take over a variety of the functions that an operating system usually performs. For example, a native hypervisor has to deal with things like power management and needs to know how to talk to graphics cards and chips, network and storage adapters, and other system hardware.
(Depending upon the virtualization architecture in question, some device interactions can be passed through to the guest operating systems, but the point remains that a native hypervisor is exposed to hardware details and idiosyncrasies that are masked if the hypervisor is hosted on an operating system.)
The great diversity of client hardware relative to server hardware therefore makes running native hypervisors on a PC tricky business.
It's also been the case that vendors haven't exactly pushed client-side virtualization--in contrast to using application virtualization to deliver software to clients--in a broad way. Hosted virtualization products handle specific use cases such as security (VMware ACE), running Windows applications on Macs (Parallels Desktop for Mac, VMware Fusion), and software development (VirtualBox, VMware Workstation). Start-ups are also tackling the security angle with alternative approaches. RingCube uses containers. Neocleus uses a Xen-based native hypervisor.
But no large vendor has seriously pushed a broad-based Type 1 hypervisor for the client. Microsoft, for its part, has been publicly skeptical about the idea. (Not especially surprising given that Microsoft has only reluctantly embraced virtualization--in part because native virtualization takes over some of the traditional tasks of the operating system.)
That changes with XenClient, a project that Citrix has collaborated on closely with Intel.
Here's how Citrix describes XenClient and its vision for desktop computing:
XenClient is a strategic product initiative with partners like Intel, focused on local virtual desktops. We are working together to deliver on our combined vision for the future of desktop computing.
This new virtualization solution will extend the benefits of hosted desktop virtualization to millions of mobile workers with the introduction of a new client-side bare metal hypervisor that runs directly on each end user's laptop or PC. This together with an innovative back-end desktop management solution for creating, delivering, and updating corporate desktop computing environments will transform the way corporate desktops are delivered and managed, giving IT all the security, simplicity and cost savings of centralized management, with an unprecedented level of performance, personalization and freedom for end users.
To net it out, Citrix is pushing for a future in which a hypervisor is a standard abstraction layer for every cleint and server--just the way that x86 architectures of all stripes are architected and built. Think of it as a BIOS on steroids if you will.
Citrix's interest here is obvious. After all, its strategy is to make money from managing virtualized environments. Thus, continuing with a theme from Synergy's first day, XenClient--like XenServer--will be free when made available later this year.
Intel's interest here is that XenClient is specifically targeted for systems with vPro technology. vPro includes:
- Intel Virtualization Technology (VT)--hardware assists for improved virtualization performance
- Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT)--formerly called LaGrande, provides hardware-based rooted security
- Intel Active Management Technology (AMT)--hardware management technology
Intel's Pat Gelsinger said in his keynote that vPro is ramping quickly--he claimed it was in 60 percent of the Fortune 100--but Intel is doubtless actively seeking more reasons to get businesses to upgrade to their latest and greatest client platforms.
The vision here seems a sound one. After all, IT vendors have essentially been adding layers of abstraction to mask complexity since the beginning. Even an operating system is an example of abstraction (actually many of them rolled into one software package). And use cases involving personal PCs used to access corporate networks or protected VMs that run security scanners seem far less esoteric than they did even just a couple of years back.
The question is more one of time frame. When do compelling uses get made available by software vendors in largely transparent ways for end users who are not developers or otherwise ready, willing, and able to explicitly manipulate multiple virtual machines on a single client? It isn't this year but there's a lot of reason to believe that this is the direction the client is headed.
LAS VEGAS--The consumerization of the Web will be as disruptive to distributed computing as distributed computing was to the mainframe. That was the central theme of Citrix Systems CEO Mark Templeton's keynote speech at this week's Synergy 2009 conference.
Mark Templeton, CEO, Citrix Systems
(Credit: Citrix)This is an oversimplification, of course. Over the years, companies have run their business software in many different ways--not all of which are easily categorized as either mainframe-like or PC-like. One whole era of computing architectures during roughly the 1980s commonly went by the term "client-server." However, if we think of how distributed computing in the enterprise has evolved, this broad-brush statement makes a lot of sense.
That's because the enterprise PC isn't really a personal computer any longer. The administrative and security requirements around desktop and notebook devices running an increasingly complex stew of locally installed software have seen to that. In many enterprises, they're stringently locked down as a way to protect their often fragile software payloads from corruption.
This is a drum that virtualization and cloud-computing specialist Citrix has been pounding for quite a while. Writing after Citrix iForum (Synergy's predecessor) in November 2007, I noted:
We've seen and heard a lot of praise for the democratic impulse associated with this particular phase of computing that often goes by the Web 2.0 moniker. Anyone can post. Anyone can publish. Anyone can photograph. Your vote matters in social media.
And alternative ways of accessing and running applications have indeed made it easier to do things outside of a strict IT framework. In his closing iForum keynote, Citrix CEO Mark Templeton used the phrase "making the personal computer personal again" for this idea.
It's perhaps not too surprising that the proffered solution to this problem is a variety of technologies that Citrix collectively describes as application delivery. The framework to think about it is something like a satellite TV system. A controller, a delivery network, and a receiver transmit and receive the bits; they do so independently of the actual end-point device (i.e. the TV) and the content, so long as those adhere to certain interface standards.
One could use such an architecture to deliver enterprise applications to a truly personal notebook, an employee's personal system rather than an IT asset. Although still relatively uncommon in an enterprise context when it comes to PCs, it's a fairly common model with smartphones, though we're starting to see the beginnings of such an approach in the PC space too.
What this means specifically in a Citrix environment is that Citrix Delivery Center "head-end controllers" such as XenApp and XenDesktop advertise services--that is, applications that are available for users to run. New services or service updates are then loaded or streamed to a client.
One of Tuesday's major announcements was Citrix Receiver, which the company describes as "the first universal client for IT service delivery":
Under the hood, Citrix Receiver is a lightweight universal software client with an extensible browser-like "plug-in" architecture. Receiver comes standard with a variety of optional plug-ins that communicate with head-end infrastructure in the Citrix Delivery Center product family such as XenApp, XenDesktop, Citrix Access Gateway, and Branch Repeater.
These plug-ins support functionality such as online and offline app usage, virtual-desktop delivery, secure access control, password management, app acceleration, multimedia acceleration, service-level monitoring, and voice communications. This model enables IT to effectively operate as a service provider to their own employees, proactively and transparently monitoring end-user experience from a central location.
Receiver is available for Windows, Macs, and iPhones. Citrix also plans to support Windows Mobile and Symbian operating systems. It's also working with Open Kernel Labs to support Android. In all cases, Receiver is free.
In general, as with XenServer, Citrix' strategy is to make its money from the management and delivery software infrastructure rather than all of the base-level components.
The final announcement of the day was Dazzle. It's built on top of Receiver and accesses the same head-end services. It is, in a sense, Citrix application delivery meets Web 2.0.
I mean that in a somewhat metaphorical sense. But Dazzle is a self-service application store for employees that very deliberately and consciously mimics the conventions and approach of something like the iTunes Store. Web 2.0 and cloud-computing attributes, like self-service, device independence, and remote access are what help so many consumer applications make traditional enterprise apps look a bit shopworn by comparison.
And that's what Mark Templeton was talking about when he said the enterprise application delivery model is being disrupted by the consumer Web.
