Category: computers

Coming to your city – the internet of machines

A chart by sensor manufacturer Libelium illustrates how the internet of machines is growing

An intriguing infographic from Spanish sensor manufacturer Libelium – which to Australian ears sounds like a new age defamation law firm – illustrates how the internet of things is being used in all walks of life from shipping containers to park benches.

The notable thing about the diagram is pretty well all of the sensor applications have been available for years – in some cases decades – and its only with the arrival of cheap sensors and pervasive internet access that widespread monitoring has becoming possible.

Libelium smart world infographic

With affordable, even disposible, sensors coupled with internet projects like Google Loon and Australia’s National Broadband Network, these networks are now possible at a price that won’t sink a government’s budget.

In fact these sensor networks will probably improve councils’ and governments’ budgets as they promise to improve the efficiency of services like rubbish collection and street repairs.

The real challenge is managing all the data this equipment gathers, that’s going to be one of the big jobs of the next decade.

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The PC industry’s search for new directions

Microsoft and Dell struggle to reinvent themselves in the post PC era

All Things D reported over the weekend that Microsoft executives are fretting over a major restructure being planned by CEO Steve Ballmer. This is part of the fundamental changes challenging the entire PC industry.

Ballmer is dealing with massive changes in Microsoft’s core business as PC sales decline with customers moving to smartphones, tablet computers and cloud computing so finding new markets is a priority for the company’s board and senior management.

The same problems are facing all the major players in the PC industry and it’s the main reason why Dell is in the throes of a battle to take their business private, what’s fascinating is the different ways these companies are responding to these changes.

In Dell’s case the company’s looking at becoming “an Enterprise Solutions and Services (ESS) focused business” – essentially copying what IBM did a decade ago in moving from hardware and focusing on consulting and services to large corporations.

Microsoft on the other hand sees the future in devices and cloud computing with Ballmer telling shareholders last year that becoming a “devices and services company” is the future.

It’s important to recognize a fundamental shift underway in our business and the areas of technology that we believe will drive the greatest opportunity in the future.

In Ballmer’s view those opportunities lie in cloud computing services and devices like the Windows Surface tablet computer and the smartphones, products which Dell struggled with during the 2000s.

These are two very different directions and it illustrates just how the major players in the PC industry are searching for new business models as the old one collapses.

How many of them successfully make the transition will be for history to examine; it’s easy to see Microsoft surviving given its massive financial reserves and market power, although nothing can be taken for granted as we could have said the same about Kodak twenty years ago.

Dell on the other hand is far weaker being smaller with a narrower product base and currently has the management distraction of competing buyout offers. Dell’s survival is far from certain.

Others, like HP, seem to be slipping into obscurity as management flip-flops from one scheme to another. The takeover of EDS as part of HP’s move into enterprise consulting does not seem to have gone well and the company is wallowing.

What we’re seeing is the rapid disruption of an industry that itself was the disruptor not so long ago. It reminds us that even the corporated giants of today are as vulnerable as the stagecoach companies of yesteryear in the face of rapid change.

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How form factors evolve as tech affects design

Technology often dictates design. As tech evolves, we can rethink the design of many things we take for granted.

Technology often dictates design. As tech evolves, we can rethink the design of many things we take for granted.

While out helping a friend shop for computers this morning, it occurred to me how the keyboards of laptop PCs have changed.

For many years, notepad keyboards were restricted to roughly 80 characters as the 4 x 3 ratio of screens have dictated the dimensions of of the keys. Here’s an example.

 80-character-keybaord

In recent times though the wider screen dimensions of laptops has seen the resurrection of an older layout — the 102 key layout with an added numerical pad.

 102-character-keyboard

What’s interesting about this is how technology form factors evolve.

Not so long ago mobile phone manufacturers were competing to create the smallest handset. Cellphones like the  Motorola Razr pushed the limit on how small phones could be.

With the arrival of the smartphone, the size and shape of mobile phones changed. Now the limiting factor was a screen big enough to read the internet on and display a thirty key keyboard.

Now reliable handwriting recognition software means that some phones can eliminate the use of keyboards at all, which means we may start to see the race to create smaller cellphones restarting.

The layout of all of the items we use, from cars to computers, is largely determined by technology limitations. As the tech evolves, we can start to rethink how a device is designed, just as the laptop and iPhone designers did.

With whole new display, input and sensing technologies being developed, there are many household items that may well look different in the near future.

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Microsoft’s business fightback

Microsoft stake their place in the CRM market. How will this affect companies like Salesforce?

Yesterday a series of vendor briefings showed how Microsoft is fighting back in the enterprise computing market and taking on upstarts like Salesforce in the CRM and business analytics markets.

Microsoft’s briefing presented a series of happy customers – including Colliers International, Servcorp and Metricon Homes – describing how they had deployed the Microsoft Dynamics product.

All the businesses at the Microsoft event said how it fitted into their existing business IT infrastructure. All were Windows shops running Exchange and Sharepoint.

This installed base illustrates Microsoft’s strength in the Enterprise marketplace along with its partner network of resellers and integrators.

Microsoft’s partner network was illustrated at HP’s Next Generation of Information Workers briefing where the company’s workplace of the future vision is very much a Windows service, even the layout is a replica of the Window 8 tiled layout.

The Next Generation of Information Workers product is largely built over Microsoft’s Sharepoint and HP’s own Trim product which again shows how legacy providers are leveraging their established technology.

Whether this is enough to hold off the likes of Salesforce and other cloud based services remains to be seen. Being Windows-centric is particularly tough at a time when many employees bringing their own Apple iPads and Android smartphones to work.

Microsoft’s awareness of its position was shown in the billing of the briefing where the invite billed the session as showing how Microsoft competes with Salesforce.

That competition is manifesting itself with both Salesforce and Microsoft aggressively acquiring social, analytics and marketing platforms to compliment their CRM products.

If the competition was just a matter of size there would be little contest as Microsoft’s $290 billion stock market capitalisation is more than ten times bigger that of Salesforce’s.

But it isn’t just a matter of size. Microsoft are have a legacy business to protect while disruptors like Salesforce aren’t encumbered by older desktop and server products.

What is clear though is that Microsoft is gearing to fight for these markets.

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Steve Ballmer’s big platform change

Microsoft contemplates big changes as the computer market evolves around portable tablets and smartphones.

All Things D today reports that Microsoft is considering a major restructure to reflect changed computing markets.

One of the big messages from The State Of The Internet report is we are seeing three simultaneous changes to the computer industry – the shift from personal computers to smartphones, tablet computers and wearable systems – and Microsoft is at the centre of these transformations.

One graph, first released by Aysmco and expanded in the Meeker presentation, illustrates how fundamental these shifts are to Microsoft’s business.

mary meeker computingmarketshare-640x480

Microsoft’s domination of the computer industry was almost total at the beginning of the century and remained so until the iPhone was released in 2007. Then suddenly things changed.

With the success of Android and the iPad, the market shifted dramatically against Microsoft and the WinTel market share is now back to 1985 levels when the Commodore 64 was a credible competitor.

The change that Microsoft faces shouldn’t be understated, although the company’s strengths with products like Office, Azure and Hotmail (or whatever this year’s name for their online mail product is) give the once untouchable incumbent some opportunities, particularly in the cloud.

At the end of Mary Meeker’s presentation at the D11 conference, Walt Mossberg asked her about Microsoft’s view that tablets and smartphones are just new computing platforms. Meeker dismisses that with the observation that the data is clear, the market has shifted to Apple and Google.

“Google and Apple are driving innovation,” says Meeker. “Microsoft is not.”

The numbers aren’t lying for Microsoft. That’s why Steve Ballmer has to move fast and think creatively about the company’s future.

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ABC 702 mornings – Storage and your computer

How we deal with the information explosion in the age of Big Data is the topic of today’s 702 Sydney segment with Linda Mottram

This morning on 702 Sydney I’m talking to Linda Mottram on the decidedly unsexy topic of storage – hard drives, cloud computing and the struggle to keep up with ever expanding file sizes of documents, photos and downloads.

It’s an opportunity to revisit the How Much Data Does The Internet Need topic which I covered for Radio National last year, although almost certainly that needs updating.

Earlier this year networking vendor Cisco released its 2013 Virtual Networking Index which forecast global data traffic growing fourteen fold over the next five years.

Those bytes slopping around the internet have to come to rest on someone’s hard drive and this is what’s driving the storage crisis.

Yesterday US business site Venture Beat had an op-ed by an executive from Seagate, the world’s biggest hard drive manufacturer where he discussed the storage challenges with a claim from industry consultants IDC that worldwide computer storage is 2.7 zettabytes.

A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes, or ten followed by twenty zeros – it’s the equivalent of a billion one terabyte hard drives that are standard on most cheap desktop computers.

Where those hard drives are located is the big challenge, is it on your laptop, smartphone or on a somewhere on a cloud service?

The other big challenge is what do you do with all this information – which is where the Big Data discussion comes in.

While data storage is a mundane topic, it’s a big one that matters. I hope you can tune in.

We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on 1300 222 702 or post a question on ABC702 Sydney’s Facebook page.

If you’re a social media users, you can also follow the show through twitter to @paulwallbank and @702Sydney.

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Disrupting the incumbents

Industry incumbents like Nokia and Microsoft are finding their market positions disrupted as Apple, Hauwei and Samsung reinvent the marketplaces.

One of the truisms of modern business is that no incumbent is safe, Microsoft, Nokia and Hauwei are good examples of just how businesses that five years ago dominated their industries are now struggling with changed marketplaces.

In the last two days there’s been a number of stories on how the smartphone and computer markets are changing.

According to the Wall Street Journal’s tech blog, PC manufacturers are hoping Microsoft’s changes to Windows 8 reinvigorates the computer market.

Those hopes are desperate and somewhat touching in the face of a structural shift in the marketplace. These big vendors can wait for the Big White Hope to arrive but really they have only themselves to blame for their constant mis-steps in the tablet and smartphone markets.

Now they are left behind as more nimble competitors like Apple, Samsung and the rising wave of Chinese manufacturers deliver the products consumers want.

All is not lost for Microsoft though as Chinese telecoms giant Hauwei launches a Windows Phone for the US markets which will be available through Walmart.

Hauwei’s launch in the United States is not good news though for another failing incumbent – Nokia.

Nokia’s relationship with Microsoft seems increasingly troubled and the Finnish company is struggling to retain leadership even in the emerging markets which until recently had been the only bright spot in the organisation’s global decline.

Yesterday in India, Nokia launched a $99 smartphone to shore up its failing market position on the subcontinent.

For the three months to March, Nokia had a 23 percent share of mobile phone sales in India, the world’s second-biggest cellular market by customers, Strategy Analytics estimates. Three years ago it controlled more than half the Indian market.

India isn’t the only market where Nokia is threatened – in February Hauwei launched their 4Afrika Windows Phone aimed at phone users in Egypt, Nigeria, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Angola, Morocco and South Africa.

The smartphone market is instructive on how many industries are changing, almost overnight the iPhone changed the cell phone sector and three years later Apple repeated the trick with the iPad, in both cases incumbents like Motorola, Nokia and Microsoft found themselves flat footed.

As barriers are falling with cheaper manufacturing, faster prototyping and more accessible design tools, many other industries are facing the same disruption.

The question for every incumbent should be where the next disruption is coming from.

In fact, we all need to ask that question as those disruptions are changing our own jobs and communities.

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