The Apple Impact (2023)

 On January 9th, 2007 Apple introduced the iPhone. On January 14th, 2007 I wrote about what I called "the Apple Impact."

Other than being wrong that it would be called the iPhone - I remain proud of my prognostications based not on what the announced iPhone did, but rather what it meant.

I think there are a few similar observations to be made about the newly announced Vision Pro mixed-reality headset. Its adoption curve might be different, and perhaps slower, but the ramifications are more profound.

Yes expensive, yes it is "a MAC strapped to my face", and some like Scott Galloway believe it will be the "Ishtar of computing products" (god I love that phrase!).

All that said, I think Apple has done a superb anchor and shift product strategy where we go from a defined concept to something new. First, what is it NOT? It is NOT a virtual reality headset, we have all seen those, and we don't like them, and these are not that.

It simply looks like ski goggles, something we have all seen, and we have seen "normal people" wearing them to do normal things. Sure wearing them in my living room is a little weird - but it is definitely not a lot weird. 

Tackling the fact that no one wants to look silly is critical for the Vision Pro.  Setting aside a number of Google Glasses issues, once the concept of "glasshole" came to the fore, those were doomed. Vision Pro will start indoors and then move outdoors in a gradual way. Based on the launch demonstrations - I think they will clear the acceptance hurdle. 

Absent a concerted regulatory effort Vision Pro and AR (augmented reality) in general is going to find itself in a disparate set of high value markets while letting innovation, price discovery, human curiosity, obdurance, and perversion find other paths to market.

Driving: People will want to drive with these

• No power problems
• 4.9 trillion miles in cars in 2020 with an average of 1.5 passengers per car (I am betting that half person will not mind you wearing a headset)
• Fundamentally we are just moving the windshield closer and wrapping it around your face

Recreation: Cycling, Skiing and more.

• Terrain maps
• Performance information
• Integration to proximity detectors on your vehicle or person
• Geolocation for family and friends (imagine on the ski slope!)

Surgeons: Augmentation of medical procedures will be omnipresent

• Faceshields/masks are common already so little inhibition 
• Recording of medical procedures from practitioner view
• In-procedure overlay of X-ray, MRI, PET, CAT, etc.

Law enforcement: Augmentation and substitution of elements of the job today

• Facial recognition
• Replacement for body cams
• Short range mapping to know location of other first responders

Professional sports: 

• Can the ruggedized version take an NFL-sized hit? (Early mobile phones shattered on gentle impact - now they bounce.)
• Could enable "rogue" leagues that adopt the technology to challenge the leagues that don't adopt
• Could enable new "sports" to emerge

Streamers:

• Welcome to The Truman Show

There are definitely companies and products today that will be displaced just like Blackberry and Garmin, and flashlights and guitar tuners were by the Apple iPhone impact.  I hope a number of them are already going through their "oh hell" process, but the gradient will be shallow, and in some ways easy to ignore until too late.

For example, take the "home entertainment system" as a proxy. Once upon a time this meant a turntable/cd-player, equalizer, and speakers. It was one of the first expenses incurred upon getting a full time job. Friends came over and listened to music together. Now it is likely that a group of friends are sitting around with earbuds listening to their own choice of music on Spotify while each ordering separate Door Dash.

Given that example, what will happen to the large screen television experience? Today there is still quite a bit of shared visual entertainment experience - but the Vision Pro mixed-reality headset, its siblings, and competitors will diminish that market segment significantly. Sure, not next year, remember it is only "2007", wait until you see what happens in 16 years. 

AR is going to lead to emergence of a much broader distributed entertainment and social experience likely at a cost to the physically shared experience. We are already able to feel "close to people who are far" with the technologies of today, but this is an accelerator. With our time and attention "enclosed", it creates the opportunity to tune out and become "far from people who are close".

All that said, the thing that impresses me the most out of the launch event, the early demonstrations, and the overall message ethos, is that it gives Apple A LOT OF WIGGLE ROOM. The initial positioning leaves wide open brand permission to move into any and all of the areas mentioned above and more. 

It was a Rorschach launch - letting us see what we want it to be, more so than the "wow-bang look at this" Steve Jobs 2007 iPhone launch. In letting us see ourselves in the reflection of the screen, we have been invited to the mixed-reality world, more so than sold a product.

There are two wildcards as spatial computing emerges that I would like to note.

One, I wonder what is the voice we will be hearing with our spatial audio. 

Vision Pro emerges at the same time as the artificial intelligence breakout. What will these gods of unknown intention be whispering in our ears? I can't quite yet imagine these two emergent technologies combined and how it could bring about completely new social environments - with all the good and all the terrible amplified.

Two, like the adoption of AI, I think the biggest risks to AR are regulatory. 

Absent a concerted regulatory effort, it is going to infiltrate almost every product space, profession, and practice. Like with AI which is already in the bedazzled gaze of government, what regulatory impulses will be activated by Vision Pro and AR? Will there be a rapid regulatory response of "no you can't do that"? 

As per the iPhone at inception, I actually don't care what Vision Pro 2024 does, I care what it means.

It means "Everything changes."

Cloud Predictions 2010

Thanks to the gang over at VMblog.com for soliciting cloud computing predictions for 2010.

Here is a link to my attempts to discern the murky future: http://vmblog.com/archive/2009/12/30/2010-in-cloud-computing-game-on.aspx

Happy New Year

Is the Cloud Ready for the Enterprise?

Absolutely!

Especially now that the "private cloud" has been deemed possibly real and useful by the cloud vendors.

The emergence of the private cloud is a major event in enterprise IT infrastructure. The argument against "private cloud" has been it may not be truly elastic, it may not be pay-as-you-go on a fine grained basis and has many discrepancies with how we are beginning to view public clouds.

In this case you have to look in the eye of the beholder, the enterprise IT exec. Most enterprise IT executives I know are pretty bright, and extremely realistic about the dysfunction that litters the corporate landscape. They know there are areas of activity they aren't good at, or are over-complicated, and usually even know why, but they can't necessarily change their organization. So when an enterprise guy says he "wants his own private cloud"...he is stipulating to the jury up front the following types of deformations in his environment:

• IT is a captive vendor to a captive customer
  
• IT is creating many "one of" products
• IT can't take on debt
• IT can't issue equity
• IT reports equally to multiple masters
• IT's multiple masters range from benignly ignoring each other to actively (and with mal-intent) attempting to damage each others operating division
• IT can't spend the total sum of money that its multiple masters ask it to spend
  
• IT is highly regulated and audited
  
• and more.......

IT execs are saying, "OK, despite that pile of problems listed above, I want to be as "cloudy" as possible, because I can see the ways a 'best instantiation' against this backdrop can really help me."

My question is "Why are cloud land folks so pedantic on this point?" Putting in place one of the cloudy solutions available today and its associated loosely coupled automation infrastructures today gives that IT exec WAYYYY more bang for their buck than they get out of the big, over-complicated, baroque, metal provisioning solutions left over from the end days of the dot-com era.

My response is "good thinking guys, let's get you a private cloud and take it from there!"

Ongoing Cloud Rorschach

Is this cloudy? What do you see in the following images?*

The Announcement





The Call to Action


Notice in "tiny" print at the bottom - consult your Verizon Business representative - click on "Contact Us".



The Contact Form

No public docs. No visibility to features, functions, pricing.
Am I a public company, how big am I, parent legal entity, etc..

Certainly cloudy.

Is Enterprise ready for the Cloud?

This is one of the questions being bandied about in the Cloud world. And this is different than "is the Cloud ready for the enterprise".

I look to the System Integrator market as a guide. For example, Japan traditionally has been an environment where very little proprietary or custom application development is done by enterprises themselves, it is done by "SIers". The enterprises that have the core competencies to do custom development don't keep it in house, they in fact create an SI business. This is why you run into SIs named after large industrial manufacturers.

Increasingly this is occurring in the US and Western Europe; enterprises depend on SI's for implementation and even process and governance in some cases.

What does this mean? It means that whatever the internal IT budget is, many organizations have a greater appetite for the use of IT to enable their business than they are willing or able to put directly into the hands of their IT department. I take from this, that the limit is not available funds for the IT department, it is the IT department either cannot (or is perceived to be unable t0) effectively utilize the funds. The SI becomes one of the key levers business management and the CIO have to expand capacity.

Prior to cloud computing, the SI still, for the most part, had to come back to the IT department/data center operations "hat in hand" to get the implementation of the project deployed. Now the SI's will have multiple cloud relationships or run their own cloud. This creates another lever the enterprise. And, it grows the prominence and footprint of the SI in their business relationship with the enterprise.

It even begins to make them more of a channel for other vendors goods and services than they are today. I am thinking "go long" some of the key SIs in your portfolio as the market rebounds. A lot of them are sitting on their hands right now, actually investing less than my company CohesiveFT does, to meet customers needs in the cloud. But some of them look ready to move with real resources behind real business plans.

"What is a cloud" ruckus

Memo to everyone.
Dateline Chicago.

We are not going to end up with a uniform definition of "cloud".

We have been doing "open systems", "open standards" and "open source" for decades now - and we don't have a uniform definition of "open".

We have been "patching" software for decades and I can tell you there is no uniform definition around what a "patch" is, or what the behavior of "patching" actually entails.

We are developing a Rosetta stone of cloud-ish attributes. And I for one am ok with the Sun definition. I think Dave Douglas, Lew and company have done a good job of making it generally understandable without being overly proscriptive or prescriptive.
http://www.slideshare.net/kvjacksn/sun-cloud-chalk-talk-presentation

For my interests I have a subset of the Sun view.

Pat Cloud is:

Cloud User defines a workload
This is done manually or via automation. The workload is in the form of a "language module" (Java EAR, Java WAR, Python Egg, Ruby gem, Python-Django-AppEngine tar file).


Cloud User moves workload to cloud (either manually or via automation)

The workload uses resources
It dynamically accesses and consumes network, storage, processing, and possibly some value added services.

The Cloud has certain minimal attributes
It has an API.
It takes credit cards or PayPal.
It allows short time window usage (pay by the minute, hour, day, week?)

This works for me - and helps me get a lot of work done. Cheers.

The Open Cloud Ruckus in verse (compliments of RoboPoem)

For those of you have missed the fuss over the Open Cloud Manifesto, a veritable Greek Tragedy, and are even less inclined to read the voluminous email trail of pronouncement, criticism, critique, hysteria, fear and even rational discourse (in some small amount), here are the events in 4 poems as the result of google cloud group texts cut-and-pasted, then translated to verse by the wonderful RoboPoem.

Note: I first did this last Friday night, but did not want to pile on Reuven Cohen anymore than was happening. We are both at the Cloud Computing Expo today and he assures me he will take no umbrage.

I. The Manifesto
Cloud providers must work together dot
That the challenges to cloud adoption chant grapeshot
Portability applicability
immeasurable applicability
Addressed through open collaboration puff
Appropriate use of standards dress rebuff
Providers must not use their market heady
Lock customers into their sate unsteady
And limiting their choice of providers snout
Providers must use and adopt though redoubt
Wherever appropriate the it foghorn
Invested heavily in escalade stillborn
And standards organizations there dought
Need to duplicate or reinvent clinch got
When new standards or adjustments to hemstitch
Are needed we must be judicious astrology deathwatch

II. The Backdrop of Events
I define cloud computing as elastic vein
Resources' with a value'added stack cell arraign
Providing ha linear reincorporate
Etc' a all accessed by a scum alleviate
In theory' apps running on the same cloud should be braids
Share americanization choroids
Have mentioned in the definition of cloud game
Done in today's data centers a data nan frame
Be elastic today infact quite a ravishing
Been working on grid/utility/on walk absorbing
Centers for atleast 10 years they are also nephrons
On a pay'as'you'go model' many course gridirons
Especially in the enterprise world have slurred
Scalability automatic disjoint cowherd


III. The Furor
Hi to all' i think this rooster
Getting nowhere fess blaster
Feel i must express my doom
Think the whole weighting showroom
Not really obeying
Whether chaffered displaying
Lead this thing in new york trig
He is the leader oat dig
What anybody has played
About it he started pope fade
Thing and he has my vote beech
Regarding the reside preach
With microsoft' the outdid
The way things are dye outdid
Why the secrecy i yore
Are at a warm sophomore
This industry where we twice
That open tent sacrifice


IV. The Apology
Dear friends' it is with an eye fireside
Open future that we bay eyed
Many apt criticisms sneak
The cloud computing nor relique
Ccif and the difficult shabby
Which this abolishers clubby
Itself' as the organizers of crew
We would like to make our scab blue
The following letter is feet
Edict or decree berth deceit
A heartfelt attempt to reach lapp
Our fellow ethyl overlap
So we might begin to move smear
Events and complied anywhere
Our options' an apology while sup
This week's metaphysical up
Well argued posts one expanse
To inevitability trance


This covers the gist of the events. You should now be up to date.
I for one, am getting back to work.

pk