Opinion: Navel gazing

Kralj is a Microsoft senior architect and futurist, and he had the ‘locknote’ gig at TechEd 08.

For those who came in late, ‘locknotes’ are at the opposite end of a conference from ‘keynotes’, and they are either designed to ‘lock’ together all the themes of the conference (theoretical viewpoint) or offer something tantalising to ‘lock’ the delegates into hanging around until the very end of the show (organiser’s viewpoint).

Kralj used to work at IBM in the “good old days” when the money just kept rolling in from their mainframe business. He sheeted the blame for IBM’s relative demise down to not being prepared to put the old mainframe cash-cow out to pasture soon enough.

He warned delegates that the future doesn’t care about your cash-cows no matter how sacred they might be, and if you’re not prepared to shoot them when the time comes, then the market will shoot them anyway and leave you to clean up the mess.

He then returned to the surfing analogy introduced by newly promoted surfer Peter Watson who introduced Kralj, warning the audience to “ride the wave or get swamped”.

He then regaled us with the now common view of the great digital divide – not between rich and poor but between digital immigrants (basically, those born last century) and digital natives (those who regard withdrawal of mobile phone privileges as a form of child abuse).

He told of the coming generation’s total lack of loyalty to brand-names using his son’s friend’s attraction to a new laptop because it was red-coloured rather than having the right logo or a particular operating system.

These emerging generations grew up with information overload and automatically filter out the crap – in order to survive.

To give us a glimpse of the future he took us back to 1997 when there were 24 IT vendors shipping server-class boxes. Fast forward to this year and there are now only six vendors, with one-third of their output being consumed by Microsoft, Google and Yahoo.

He then showed a picture of a container load of servers from HP being delivered to Microsoft’s datacentre in Chicago.

Except that you don’t open this container. The servers inside are pre-configured and never leave their enclosures.

This is battery-farming IT-style. You stack it in the warehouse with your other 200-odd containers, and plug in a giant power cord, a fat water pipe and a fibre optic cable carrying 10-gigabit Ethernet.

And it’s in Chicago because two-thirds of the power is used for cooling and the cold winds blow off Lake Michigan most of the year.

Iceland is even colder, so that’s where the latest monster datacentres are being located.

They have zero-pollution geothermal power there too, and the country is midway along the fibre optic trunks going between Europe and the USA. Oh, and nobody from HP will turn up to repair your busted servers until around 5 percent of the container contents have died.

Everything in there is running virtually anyway, so you just don’t bother using servers that have snuffed it.

Microsoft’s Chicago datacentre of 200+ server containers, each with at least 1000 servers inside, is run by a staff of just 35 – most of whom are security guards on a roster, so there’s nobody there to do tech repairs.

The others look after the power and cooling. The rest is done remotely from – wherever.

Kralj thinks the future belongs to context and location driven by essential protocols with users no longer caring how it happens or what box of tricks makes it happen.

He believes the next iteration of the Web will move from interaction to reality augmentation, noting that fully half of young people in the USA now meet their romantic partners online.

He recently received a resume from a young applicant who demonstrated his leadership ability by referring to the level he’d attained in the online game World of Warcraft.

The audience of geeks were amused – Kralj said that had been his initial reaction too, but then he realised it took many years of dedication and persistence to become a Level 65 Half-Elf.

He postulated that perhaps the Mayor of Sydney in 2020 would be a 17-year-old Indian from Hydrabad who only ever attends web-based council meetings. Will meritocracy replace democracy, he asked?

The USA is producing 100,000 IT graduates annually while China is generating 500,000 IT graduates per year and they all speak fluent English, and more than half of them are female.

He concluded that IT as we know it today can’t sustain itself much longer, and predicted that even his own position of “information architect” would be rendered irrelevant by the coming waves of change.

Will TechEd 2020 be a virtual global conference instead of the current travelling circus? Or will it happen even sooner than that?