I see the cloud as a means by which business units will disentangle themselves from internal IT shops, eventually moving to a model where internal IT equates to one primary component, which are high-power IT experts with exemplary communication skills who serve as proxies between the business unit and outsourced IT services. There will be a small shop of these people for each business in broad areas such as development and infrastructure.

People in these groups will be highly skilled in a wide range of IT disciplines and will excel at understanding business requirements and being able to translate them into requests for outsourced services. The reason this model will dominate is because using an internal IT shop is like hiring family members to do work on your house; it’s nice to have family do the work rather than a stranger, but only until things go wrong. Then it’s much, much worse.

Basically, the trend will be for businesses to have the following components:

1. Business
2. Technical consultants that coordinate outsourcing (go-betweens)
3. Giant pools of liquid consulting services in Infrastructure, Applications, Security, Development, etc.–mostly based out of the cloud.

In other words, everything will be obfuscated from the business–even more so than it is now. So when the business has a need, they get on the phone and tell their go-between what they want, in business terms. The go-between then translates that request to outsourced services terms and gets things moving.

So instead of business account reps getting with IT and asking/requesting for some sort of service, the go-between will get on the phone with his favorite four outsourced solutions, which are just giant liquid pools of resources, and make them compete for the business. Then the implementation will be:

• 6 CloudServ Servers
• 15 DevNet developers
• 1 UberSecure Security Consultant

…and coordination to get them all working together as an ad-hoc team, which they will be highly familiar with.

The key advantage here is that any issue the go-between has with one of the developers is immediately fixable. One phone call–he’s not on the project anymore. He’s just one instantiation of $clouddeveloper, just as the servers are instantiations of $cloudinfrastructure.

This provides the business the most agility. Availability and security concerns are handled by the legal department and insurance, via SLAs. So the cloud becomes this amorphous, liquid mass of instantaneous service across all areas of IT–all with their own security and SLA promises–ready to cater to the businesses out there that need them.

This is where the IT worker comes in. There will be a few basic job roles in this new paradigm:

1. The local fix-it guy. You work for a contracting company in their support division. You are an instantiation of $desktopguy, or $networkcable. You live in a certain city and thus get “assigned” to local companies as your company wins contracts with local businesses. So there will still be IT staff onsite doing cabling, upgrading desktops, etc., but this will all be handled through outsourced contracts.

2. The go-between. This is one of the few IT people that actually works directly for the business as an employee. They manage all the outsourcing in tune with business needs. These are very high-level and respected positions–requiring skillsets of consultants, account reps, and executives simultaneously.

3. The cloud-based consultant. These are the experts in all the various IT fields that travel from place to place doing their trade. They all work for outsourcing companies which are constantly competing to be the primary choice for businesses. Each company will have specializations, but many will be one-stop-shops like we see today.

Anyway, this is all very early-stage thought. I’d love to hear feedback. ::

This is an interesting post about how the concept of PageRank for URLs is becoming dated at best, and obsolete at worst.

The idea is that people post in multiple places, and that search engines need to track them across all of them, not just their highly ranked home URL.

So basically, the reputation rank would be on the person, not the URL.

This is a neat idea, and it’s pretty much like whuffie from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

In the novel, everyone walked around with a reputation score hovering above them, which was a combination of all their various contributions to society. And as you did things your score would go up and down.

Interesting. ::

An interesting collection of stuff to think about, by Robin Hanson:

http://hanson.gmu.edu/wildideas.html

On similar topics is one of my favorite essays of all time, by Bill Joy:

Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us

::

Image from particlemechanics.com

A friend recently forwarded me an email I sent to him in 2004. It was part of conversation about where messaging was going, e.g. texting vs. email vs. voice, etc. Specifically we were discussing how South Koreans thought email was for old people, and that they were using SMS as their primary method of communication:

Here’s what I wrote:

Soon, it’ll just be information, and where you are when you get it won’t matter all that much. The only difference between getting it at home and getting it while SCUBA diving will be the frills on the interface.

So this raises the question: what are the real differences in messaging? Why are there even still distinctions between types of messages? Why is email called email, when most people just use it for text? WhLet’s start with a list of differentiators:

Medium Capabilities

1. Media Support: text, rich formatting, images, voice, video, *hologram
2. Endpoint Addressing: email address, phone number, *PersonalID
3. Client Capabilities: mobile phone keyboards, full home keyboards, microphones, mobile phone displays, home displays

…and now the implementations:

Existing Technologies

1. Email
2. Text Messaging
3. Voicemail
4. IM

In other words, why can’t email do voicemail? Why can’t “text” messages handle rich text? Why can’t you send text in a voicemail? Etc. What are the fundamental lines that cannot be blurred?

And if any such lines exist, why do they? Are they not just limitations of implementation, and not of any inherent distinctions?

It’s All About the Human

So the answer is that there were really three reasons for these distinctions being created between email, IM, texting, and voice.

1. It’s just how the technology evolved. We had email before mobile phones, so it came before SMS, etc. Same with voicemail; it came naturally given the fact that we already had a teleophone system.
2. Related to that is the issue of technology permeation. You can only use mediums that other people are using as well, so it depends on the infrastructure being there.
3. Capabilities are constrained by the limitations of human-to-device interface. So we haven’t been doing full video on mobile phones until recently because the devices couldn’t handle it, but now they increasingly can. Not to mention the networks the content has to traverse.

Consolidation

The point of highlighting all these distinctions is to show that they are going away, and what will remain is a system where all devices will have the ability to create and display all of the various types of media.

At that point it’ll just be messaging. Not email. Not text. Not video. Not voice. Just a message that happens to be in one of these formats.

All systems, including your personal device (it won’t be called a phone for much longer) will be able to create messages in all of these formats, as well as view them as well. And of course your main systems at home will have the same capabilities, albeit with better processing, input, and output capabilities.

The main difference right now between texting and email is not the character limit or the media that’s supported; it’s the destination. Email requires an email address, whereas texting requires a phone number. And each of these have different privacy models. That’s where services like Google Voice come in.

The Future

The future is much simpler when it comes to messaging: you’ll have an identifier and people will send messages to it. From there you’ll have a set of rules to govern which types of messages, and from whom, get sent to you at which times and on which devices.

So it’ll be something like:

1. If the message is from anyone at work, and it’s the weekend, send any voice messages to my main queue, but if it’s text (that’s alphabet text, not SMS) then send it to my personal device (including the transcriptions of the voice messages).
2. If the message is from an unknown caller, transcribe all formats and place them in my queue after 6pm, otherwise send them to my personal device for screening.
3. If the message is from my wife, always send all formats to my personal device, at any time.
4. If the messages is from one of my friends, send text transcriptions to me, but all other formats to my queue for review.

etc.

The only distinction at that point will be human interface issues, i.e. type vs. speak vs. listen vs. watch, and the constraints of doing each of those during your day to day life. ::

Absolutely stunning. Kind of like Minority Report meets Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.