Dawn of a New Day « Ray Ozzie

Ozzie wrote a memo to Microsoft and shared it with us, suggesting that we start dreaming about a post-PC world. But some of us have been doing that for years (see Why Closed Works: Moving Past Steampunk Thinking About The Future Of Computing, Not A Wall, A World: The Future Of User Experience).

Leaving aside the fact that envisioning a Post-PC isn’t very radical, at least outside of Microsoft, what does he suggest?

Continuous Services | Connected Devices

As we’ve begun to embrace today’s incredibly powerful app-capable phones and pads into our daily lives, and as we’ve embraced myriad innovative services & websites, the early adopters among us have decidedly begun to move away from mentally associating our computing activities with the hardware/software artifacts of our past such as PC’s, CD-installed programs, desktops, folders & files.

Instead, to cope with the inherent complexity of a world of devices, a world of websites, and a world of apps & personal data that is spread across myriad devices & websites, a simple conceptual model is taking shape that brings it all together.  We’re moving toward a world of 1) cloud-based continuous services that connect us all and do our bidding, and 2) appliance-like connected devices enabling us to interact with those cloud-based services.

Continuous services are websites and cloud-based agents that we can rely on for more and more of what we do.  On the back end, they possess attributes enabled by our newfound world of cloud computing: They’re always-available and are capable of unbounded scale.  They’re constantly assimilating & analyzing data from both our real and online worlds.  They’re constantly being refined & improved based on what works, and what doesn’t.  By bringing us all together in new ways, they constantly reshape the social fabric underlying our society, organizations and lives.  From news & entertainment, to transportation, to commerce, to customer service, we and our businesses and governments are being transformed by this new world of services that we rely on to operate flawlessly, 7×24, behind the scenes.

Our personal and corporate data now sits within these services – and as a result we’re more and more concerned with issues of trust & privacy.  We most commonly engage and interact with these internet-based sites & services through the browser.  But increasingly, we also interact with these continuous services through apps that are loaded onto a broad variety of service-connected devices – on our desks, or in our pockets & pocketbooks.

Connected devices beyond the PC will increasingly come in a breathtaking number of shapes and sizes, tuned for a broad variety of communications, creation & consumption tasks.  Each individual will interact with a fairly good number of these connected devices on a daily basis – their phone / internet companion; their car; a shared public display in the conference room, living room, or hallway wall.  Indeed some of these connected devices may even grow to bear a resemblance to today’s desktop PC or clamshell laptop.  But there’s one key difference in tomorrow’s devices: they’re relatively simple and fundamentally appliance-like by design, from birth.  They’re instantly usable, interchangeable, and trivially replaceable without loss.  But being appliance-like doesn’t mean that they’re not also quite capable in terms of storage; rather, it just means that storage has shifted to being more cloud-centric than device-centric.  A world of content – both personal and published – is streamed, cached or synchronized with a world of cloud-based continuous services.

Moving forward, these ‘connected devices’ will also frequently take the form of embedded devices of varying purpose including telemetry & control.  Our world increasingly will be filled with these devices – from the remotely diagnosed elevator, to the sensors on our highways and throughout our environment.  These embedded devices will share a key attribute with non-embedded UI-centric devices:  they’re appliance-like, easily configured, interchangeable and replaceable without loss.

At first blush, this world of continuous services and connected devices doesn’t seem very different than today.  But those who build, deploy and manage today’s websites understand viscerally that fielding a truly continuous service is incredibly difficult and is only achieved by the most sophisticated high-scale consumer websites.  And those who build and deploy application fabrics targeting connected devices understand how challenging it can be to simply & reliably just ‘sync’ or ‘stream’.  To achieve these seemingly simple objectives will require dramatic innovation in human interface, hardware, software and services.

Actually doesn’t sound like some astonishing insight, really.

But I wonder if he is hinting at his next start-up, where he can redo the synchronization engine of Lotus Notes and Groove Networks again. But that is pretty murky without the second chapter of his business plan, which he is probably getting ready to show to investors.