Diskless PC possibilities
I’m not a hardware guy, so please pardon me if some specifics here are implausible, but an interesting idea has arisen, and indeed turned into the subject of my December Computerworld column. Shayne Nelson raised the subject of diskless PCs based on USB/flash “drives,” and a web search uncovered a Slashdot discussion on the subject a couple of months earlier, which in turn seems to have been based on a now unavailable Yahoo story. The technology certainly would seem to be practical in the near future, and it raises some interesting ramifications and possibilities.
1. The most vulnerable, volatile, and valuable parts of the computer — the programs and data — could now be removable and put in any pocket, or mailed without much fear of breakage. Even better, they could be segmented, on multiple drives per computer. Possible security and administration benefits include:
a. The drive that stores most programs could be locked down, tight. Pick your dream technology or policy for making PC images consistent across your network; it just became a lot more plausible to implement.
b. The drive that stores most data could be entirely encrypted. Flash drive access is several orders of magnitude faster than disk access, making this a reasonable precaution even though it’s not very practical with magnetic storage.
c. What’s more, laptops might still be lost or stolen — but they wouldn’t have to have data on them! An employee whose laptop is stolen is unlucky. An employee who leaves sensitive data in an unattended laptop could now be justifiably fired.
d. In two-factor authentication, the flash drive might be the second factor. No fuss, no bother.
e. You could physically upgrade every user’s disk without shipping PCs around. Just ship flash drives around instead.
f. Enterprises could implement a policy of NO PERSONAL WEB SURFING UNLESS YOU SWAP OUT COMPANY DRIVES (and therefore presumably swap in your personal ones). All kinds of security problems would be ameliorated ASAP, at much less cost to employee goodwill than more draconian crackdowns incur.
2. Environment-specific computer equipment would now be much more affordable. Classrooms, meeting rooms, operating rooms, etc. might have more suitable devices than they now do.
3. Before long, we might not need to travel with laptop computers! Yes, devices in hotel rooms might be problematic from a security standpoint, but there are workarounds for that too. And in any environment that’s more locked down, such as a home or corporate office, the problem is almost nonexistent unless you work for a Three Letter Agency.
4. Disk space would initially be decreased, just as the Web initially made UIs worse. That’s not a huge problem, but it might not bode well for bloatware vendors (e.g., Microsoft).
Obviously, this isn’t a big deal from a business standpoint until the devices are actually manufactured and sold. But it’s fun to think about. And it actually makes a whole lot of sense.
| Categories: Diskless PCs, Hardware | 14 Comments |
Oracle’s defensiveness
I was chatting recently with what is probably my favorite guy among senior trade press editors. The subject came up of Oracle’s confrontational attitude towards analysts, and he said they’re the same way with the press — defensive, oddly demanding of control, etc.
Now, my own experiences with Oracle’s PR department have generally been positive. Typically, I have a run-in with analyst relations, and the compromise is to have PR (a separate department) handle me for that particular story instead. But what this tells me is that the main weirdness isn’t at the level of the analyst relations chief; it comes from higher up.
| Categories: DBMS vendors and technologies | Leave a Comment |
SAP’s corporate blogging
Jeff Nolan seems to be the head of blogging for SAP, or something like that. He’s a little concerned about SAP’s lack of openness. Meanwhile, I’m praising SAP for it’s openness.
I guess it’s all a matter of what your expectations are.
| Categories: Enterprise applications | 1 Comment |
Data warehouse appliance market
Philip Howard — who in my opinion usually asks good questions but commonly comes to the wrong conclusions — offers a quick overview of the data warehouse appliance market. Basically, he says Netezza is going strong, a few startups have failed, and the jury is out on a few other vendors.
My research hasn’t been as extensive as his seems to be, but in this case his conclusions sound right to me.
How the text technology market could ignite
Over on the Text Technologies blog, I have a series of posts arguing that the potentially huge market for enterprise text technologies is being stifled by the lack of a general-purpose ontology management system. I further argue that such a product could be constructed in such a way as to be actually usable and potentially adopted by mainstream enterprises (no, you don’t need a trained librarian to use it). So what are the chances of something like this actually working out, to an industry-changing extent?
First and foremost — if such a product is built, there’s a clear Crossing the Chasm path to major success. There are fairly healthy (> $100 million dollars annually each, at least) technology markets for internal enterprise search, customer-facing search, electronic publishing, text mining, and so. That creates plenty of “bowling pins” for a tool to get established. What’s more, pretty much every sufficiently large enterprise needs internal search; every enterprise with a decent-sized product set needs customer-facing search; and many industries need text mining. So the opportunity for true mainstreaming of text technology is clearly there. I don’t know whether the dominant product category is more likely to be “ontology management systems” or “search whose product differentiation lies in its ontology management subsystem,” but one way or the other the market opportunity is there.
Second, the technology seems eminently buildable. The various “smarts” needed have for the most part emerged, at least in point products. The knowledge representation scheme needed seems like a straightforward extrapolation of current ones. Anything can be given a good UI. Almost anything can be made scalable, and this doesn’t seem like one of the rare exceptions.
So it all comes down to vendor will (and wallet). I’m not aware of any vendor that’s really figured this market opportunity out yet. But sooner or later, one or more of them will surely get the point. If needed, I’ll personally help them see the light …
| Categories: Analytic technologies | 1 Comment |
Microsoft — is the intensity gone?
More and more Microsofties are complaining that the company is corporate and bureaucratic and, to be specific, empty nights and weekends.
I haven’t visited them for a few years now, and have no special insight into whether it’s true. But I can tell you this: It sure wasn’t that way in the past. I still recall a passionate, raised-voices discussion Bill Gates and I had about industry futures … after midnight … while dressed in black tie … at his girlfriend’s apartment. And that wasn’t an isolated incident.
And this spirit kept up well into the 1990s. I was on the phone with Jon Roskill (an influential marketing manager for Visual Basic, in essence, whatever his exact title is or was) on a Monday, and he commented that he was having trouble getting his head back into work after a long absence. I politely inquired as to the nature of his time off. It turned out he’d left work at 3:30 pm the prior Friday and gone camping for the weekend.
Yes, it seems Microsoft has changed a whole lot over the past decade …
| Categories: DBMS vendors and technologies, Microsoft | 1 Comment |
SAP’s technical strategy
I just posted an extensive discussion of SAP’s technical strategy over on the DBMS2 blog. Key takeaways include:
1. SAP is serious about SOAs and, in most regards, openness.
2. SAP’s strategy does not gladden the hearts of top-tier DBMS vendors.
I also dinged them for being clueless about how to succeed in text search, but hey — nobody’s perfect, and there’s still time for them to fix the problem.
One interesting aspect of their strategy that did not fit into the above-mentioned server-oriented post is their take on UI. They said again and again and again that it is important to provide a high degree of UI freedom in accessing the same underlying application services. (Except that they usually referred to the services as — no surprise here — “business processes.”) This is a reversal from their prior belief that a transactional screen — or a portal page — was sufficient for everybody.
In general, the enterprise software industry is getting a lot more sophisticated about and competitive in it’s work on UI. I should post about that soon. (The point has come up repeatedly in my work on BI, with SAP, Business Objects, and others.)
| Categories: DBMS vendors and technologies, Enterprise applications, SAP, Usability and UI | 2 Comments |
SAP — the Un-Oracle
I just spent a couple of days at the SAP Analyst “Summit.” And while all large software companies have quite a bit in common, I came away with the renewed feeling that SAP and Oracle are about as different as two huge, competitive software companies in similar businesses can be. Read more