NZ
science teacher
futurefocus–ICT
126
the disruptively changing face of ICT In the past 15 years Skype, iPod, Facebook and the USB flash drive, to name a few, have changed our lives and the only certainty is that there is more to come in the future as Professor John Hosking, Director Centre for Software Innovation and Professor of Computer Science, Department of Computer Science, at The University of Auckland explains in this thought provoking, must-read article: Predicting the future in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is difficult. Ken Olsen, President of Digital Equipment, said in 1977, “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.” How wrong can one be! The difficulty arises from the well-known Moore’s law, which states, “The number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years.” This exponential growth in chip complexity leads to all manner of derived “laws” relating to growth of computation, memory, network capacity, stored information content, etc. These provide many motivating examples for students to understand the need for exponentials and logarithms. Humans are pretty good at predictions in linear situations, but far less so when things are exponential: exponential change implies disruptive change, when existing ways of thinking are rapidly superseded and new approaches, and business models based on them, arise. Table 1, for example, lists familiar ICT organisations and products that have become iconic in approximately the last 15 years. Many started with what appeared ludicrous ideas that ICT advances made practicable: “Why use bookshops to sell books?”; “Let’s charge users nothing for our services”; “An encyclopedia anyone can edit”; or “Let’s make international phone calls free”. So it is with some trepidation that I join the group of future speculators.
Connectedness and convergence There is exponential growth in the number and range of Internet-connected devices. This is why the means of uniquely addressing devices, IPV4, is running out of “numbers”, making a shift to the newer IPV6 urgent.
Nowhere is growth more evident than in mobile devices, with the advent of laptops, netbooks, smartphones, tablets, etc. There is also a convergence of capabilities: voice, video, and web content are increasingly being bound together, both in the devices used to send and access them, and applications using them (think YouTube, Skype, OnDemand TV). This is causing a revolution in everyday use of ICT. Morgan Stanley call this the 5th cycle of ICT evolution. Table 2 shows the five cycles. In each cycle, new dominant companies have emerged based on new application and device types, and the number of units (computers or devices) has increased tenfold. Table 2: Cycles of ICT evolution/revolution, after Morgan Stanley, 2009 Cycle
Date
No of units
Iconic companies
Mainframe
1960s
1M
IBM
Mini
1970s
10M
Digital
Personal
1980s
100M
Microsoft
Desktop Internet
Late 1990s
1000M
Google, Amazon
Mobile Internet
Late 2000s
10000M
Apple? Google? Facebook?
The 5th cycle, mobile Internet, is underway and the competition for dominance is fierce. Dominance requires not just an interesting and useful application, but a platform and ecosystem: the iPhone is not just a smartphone, it is part of a platform comprising apps, iTunes, the AppStore, iPads, iPods, iPhones etc., and an ecosystem including third party app and service providers. Facebook provides a similar platform for social networks. Who will be dominant in the 5th cycle? That is not clear to me yet as mobile Internet platforms are rapidly evolving. I do predict video will be a much more significant platform feature than it has been to date. Not surprisingly, privacy issues become significant in such a highly connected, platform environment. Identity theft
Table 1: New organisations and products Organisations
8
Products
Amazon
1995
Toyota Prius hybrid
1997
1998
Commercial HDTV
1998
Salesforce.com
1999
Retail broadband in NZ
1999
TradeMe
1999
USB flash drive
2000
PayPal
2000
iPod
2001
Wikipedia
2001
F&P Dishdrawers
2002
Skype
2003
Nintendo Wii
2006
2004
iPhone
2007
2006
iPad
2010
New Zealand Association of Science Educators