IT predictions for 2009
Fri, Nov 14 2008

By Jonathan Oxer, IVT Technical Director

On Tuesday I participated in a panel session to discuss the future of IT and, in particular, what the hot topics will be for 2009. You know the deal: a bunch of "experts" sit in front of an audience and make grandiose statements about what technology will look like in 5 or 10 years, and you just know that in retrospect the predictions will either look obvious (if they came true) or naive (if they didn't).

This particular session was pretty interesting though because it maintained focus on the present and the near future, not some indeterminate point over the horizon that nobody can really see. It was about the issues facing businesses and consumers right now, and the issues they are likely to face in just a few months or a year.

Being part of these sorts of events can be a bit odd at times though. Because so much of my time these days is spent looking at the latest trends and investigating emerging technologies (or even creating them in the first place) I tend to live so far ahead of the bleeding edge that the knife blade is behind me somewhere trying to catch up, and I sometimes feel embarrassed raising issues that I feel are quite passe and so "last week" and then I'm surprised when other people think they're new and exciting. That's not to try to make myself sound good: it's just to highlight the huge variation across society in the uptake of technology. As William Gibson once said, "the future is already here, it's just not widely distributed yet".

Some of the things people are doing with technology right now may seem like science fiction, but it's not fantasy: it's reality, just a reality that isn't widely distributed yet. For example, my letterbox has a network connection and an IP address so my home automation system can be notified when the postman drops by, and my car is connected wirelessly to the internet so my mechanic can use their web browser to interrogate my engine management system and run diagnostics in real time - while the car is hundreds of kilometers away driving down the road. And I have an RFID microchip implanted in my arm so I can unlock my front door just by waving my arm near it and don't have to carry keys. Right now I'm working on a device that will detect when I leave the loungeroom so it can pause the TV automatically, then if I walk into another room with a TV it will transfer the program across to it and continue playing from the paused position without me doing a thing. The TV show (or music, or movie, or video phone call, or weather data feed, or news headlines) can just follow me around the house.

As I said, this sort of thing may sound like science fiction but it's reality for some people already. Predicting the near future therefore is really just a matter of paying very close attention to what the thought-leaders are doing, because in many cases what they are experimenting with right now is what will become reality for everyone else just a little bit down the track.

So let's cover some of the topics the panel discussed.

Cloud computing. This is one of the hot buzzwords in IT right now, and like many others it's very poorly defined. Just about everything about cloud computing has been done in some shape or form for decades, but now that a trendy label has been tacked on there's a sense of hype about it and just about every tech vendor is trying to find a way to associate themselves with the term. The general premise of cloud computing is that low-level computer resources (processor time, storage, memory, etc, and even software) can be abstracted away into a vast pool of resources that you don't need to manage directly: it just becomes something you have available "on tap" when you need it, and you turn off the tap when you're finished with it. Instead of building, deploying and managing servers directly, it enables "virtualised" servers to be created and destroyed on demand very rapidly. You don't need to care what hardware your server runs on, or even what data center it's in. You just click a few buttons and a minute later you have a server running for you to use, and when you're done you just kill it off. Amazon is one of the best known providers of this sort of technology with EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), where you can create as many servers as you like and pay for them on an hourly basis instead of buying them yourself. Instead of thinking about server cost as something that involves high up-front establishment fees and deployment delays and asset depreciation over several years, a server is just something you create for a couple of hours and pay 10 cents / hour to use. Want to run 1000 servers for a few hours for a big computational task? No problem, it'll cost you $100 / hour. No up front costs, and when you're done you just "delete" them. Much better than paying to buy, install, and configure 1000 actual servers yourself! The concept of the "cloud" applies at all levels of computing, too. For example, when you use a web application like Flickr or Gmail or Slideshare you don't care about installing the software or maintaining it. That all happens out "in the cloud". You just use it when you want it and don't think about it when you don't.

Broadband internet. The funny thing is that when this topic came up there was a collective groan from the panel because we're all tired of talking about it. It's been a sore point for years, and none of us see anything changing any time soon. It'll continue to be slower and more expensive than elsewhere in the world. Telstra will continue bickering with the other providers and the government about wholesale rates and anti-competitive behavior. Same-old same-old. Yawn.

Clean feed. In case you haven't heard about it (and it's surprising how many haven't given the potential impact of the proposal), the Australian federal government is actively pursuing a plan to censor the internet by forcing all ISPs to filter out unwanted content before it gets to end users. Under their plan it will be illegal for an ISP to provide a direct connection to the internet: all connections (not just domestic, *all*) will be filtered and an undefined list of "unwanted" websites and web services blocked. What's more, it will be illegal for the ISPs who are forced to do the filtering to reveal which sites are being blocked. They will simply stop being accessible with no explanation. What a stupid idea! From a freedom-of-speech viewpoint it's dumb because they will be able to censor anything they like without explanation. It starts with the obvious stuff that nobody can argue against (kiddy-porn), then extends to other adult content and gambling sites, then ... who knows? Any site considered to provide information of use to terrorists, even if it's of general interest? Personal blogs that criticise government policy? Wikipedia, because it contains articles about sexual health and maybe an unsupervised child using a computer might come across it? Where does it end? But even laying aside the social reasons that censorship is a bad idea, from a technical point of view it's totally ridiculous. Ask any tech-savvy computer user about whether government-imposed censorship of the internet will work and they'll laugh in your face. They'll point to projects like TOR (The Onion Router, a project to allow political activists and journalists in repressive regimes to bypass national-level filters and connect anonymously to the internet so they can't be tracked down by the secret police). They'll point out that a simple VPN connection to a server in another country provides an encrypted tunnel that the government-imposed filters can't see into, and through that tunnel you can access anything in the world without them even knowing what you're looking at. They'll point out that many protocols used on the internet now use encryption and it's impossible to see what's passing through it: think of SSL certificates for online credit card transactions, which could just as easily be used by a kiddy-porn ring to prevent the filters seeing what's being transferred - but the government can't ban SSL, because then all online commerce in Australia (including online banking) would cease to operate overnight! And even if they did become totally draconian and ban all encryption and block access to all but a few selected "family-friendly" websites and throw us back into the dark ages, it still wouldn't have the slightest impact on access to porn which (presumably) is the whole point of the project. Porn and illegal content would just be transferred by email instead. *Encrypted* email, that can't be inspected. Summary: worthy (so far) intentions, but a totally ridiculous plan. It won't work, it can't work, and the government should stop wasting our money and give up on the idea right now before they make themselves look even more stupid.

The internet of things. The examples of "the future here right now" I mentioned earlier are examples of this, which is basically the concept that in time every single device will end up connected to the internet somehow. Early products such as overpriced and useless internet fridges (really just a fridge with a laptop molded into the door) have given the concept a bad name, but the phenomenon has now gained critical mass as the incremental cost to manufacturers drops. It now only costs in the order of $2 to $5 for a manufacturer to add a network connection to an appliance so it can use your home broadband connection to increase its intelligence. You can buy an alarm clock that connects to the internet to play online radio stations and display the news headlines and stock prices on its touch screen when you wake up (www.chumby.com). You can buy an umbrella that uses a wireless internet connection to download local weather data and tell you as you walk out the door whether you need to take it with you or not (www.ambientdevices.com). TVs have internet connections so they can download program guide data. And as I mentioned previously, my letterbox has an ethernet connection so it can report when mail has been delivered. Soon there will be cat doors which connect to your home automation system to tell you whether your cat is inside or outside, and let you automatically prevent it leaving the house after dark. Eventually none of this will seem exotic or far-fetched: it will simply be *assumed* that every object around you is part of a huge mesh of information constantly being updated and commands being sent. Devices that aren't part of that mesh will seem as old-fashioned as kerosene-powered refrigerators.

Windows Vista. The consensus of the panel was that Vista has been largely bypassed as a technology. Take-up has been pathetic, with many businesses preferring to stick with XP until the next version of Windows (Windows 7) is released and never migrating to Vista at all. Even Microsoft themselves have made statements that they expect many businesses to totally bypass Vista and hang on to XP until Windows 7 comes out. Vista is now gaining traction in domestic use largely because it's extremely difficult to buy a computer without it bundled in, but in the corporate environment it basically doesn't exist. MacOS and Linux continue to slowly grow in popularity, but the underlying message from the panel was that in the long run it really doesn't matter what happens with desktop operating systems because they're becoming less relevant by the day. As more of the day to day tasks we do with computers move "into the cloud" as web applications that can be accessed using a variety of devices from your desktop computer to your mobile phone to your TV, nobody will really care much what operating system your computer runs. The operating system will become just a hardware abstraction layer to deliver cloud-based applications to your screen. Eventually we'll care about the OS about as much as you probably care right now about the BIOS in your computer, or the firmware in your network card. It'll be there just to allow other stuff to run and you won't think twice about what flavor it is.

Identity management. Right now you probably have either a huge list of usernames and passwords for all the sites you use, or you use the same username and password on every site (a very bad idea, by the way - what happens if any one of those sites is hacked and all the usernames / passwords is exposed? Whoever gets them can log in as you into all the other services you use, of course!). Technologies like OpenID provide a good basis for solving that problem but have taken a while to gain critical mass. The prediction by the panel is that identity management systems will continue to grow in importance because it touches just about every aspect of what we do online, from logging in to Flickr to entering into online contracts. The lack of strong identity management is even what allows spam to exist. If all email senders were verified, spam would cease to exist. The panel didn't see a magic-bullet solution, but it is certainly a topic to watch in the near future.

Social networking. This was another topic that brought a collective sigh from the panel because we're all sick of talking about it. A comment was made that many businesses allowed access to Facebook and other social networking sites for a while just to keep their gen-Y staff from whining too much, but then discovered that there's not much point having happy staff if they spend all their time chatting online about the party last weekend rather than doing actual work. The result in the last 12 months has been a big backlash against social networking in business, with many social networking sites now blocked at the corporate firewall. The agreement was that from a business perspective the important thing is not so much the social aspect like getting in touch with long-lost school friends, the real benefit is using social networking as the framework for collaboration inside virtual workspaces. We want to be able to create ad-hoc project teams bound together via a social networking infrastructure, and share documents and resources transparently within the context of projects so everyone is kept in the loop. That will all come, and very soon.

Government policy. Right at the end as we were running out of time the panel was asked what IT-related advice we would have for the government. Ditching the "Clean Feed" censorship project was the #1 item mentioned, of course. My suggestion was that the government should kill off the remaining technology commercialisation grants that are still hanging around because all they do is provide a good soundbite ("State Government commits $120M to the local ICT industry!" right before an election) but then most of the funds are soaked up within the bureaucracy and paying "consultants" and very little of it gets into the hands of the innovators who could use it to, you know, actually build the local ICT industry. Instead it would be better to look at successful schemes overseas in places like Canada, where a percentage of superannuation funds are invested into start-up ventures which are also provided with advice and assistance to get themselves ready for investment. Most ICT-related government initiatives at the moment are about helping us be technology consumers rather than technology producers, which is not a good long-term strategy if we still want to call ourselves "the clever country".

Whew, an epic email today!

I'd love to hear *your* predictions about where you think technology will take us in the next 12 months, so if you have a great idea bouncing around in your head please let me know at jon@ivt.com.au. In fact, to up the ante a little I'll send your choice of any one of my books to the person who comes up with the most interesting prediction.

Cheers :-)

Jonathan Oxer
Technical Director
Internet Vision Technologies