Everything for nothing

I was once in Egypt, and got harangued by all these street vendors selling stuff. “Everything for nothing!” one cried, in an attempt to get me to approach his stall. Highly humorous, and I laughed with the vendor and bought something I-don’t-even-know-what-it-is just because I liked his approach

“Everything for nothing” is clearly a joke in the real world of atoms, but it isn’t in the IT world of bits.  Sooner or later, all the commodity technology stuff we use is going to be free, or so nearly so it won’t matter.

The question going through my brain now, though, is whether the enterprise IT folk really believe it.

Most people I know believe their organisations are so special, so unique, that they can’t rely on free stuff. No, they have to have proprietary systems, dedicated networks, and piles and piles of hardware devoted to their super-special workloads.

But in the next decade or so, I can’t see why you would build a private corporate network at all. The internet will be way cheaper and more reliable as well as ubiquitous. Why not just use that instead? Oh, I know all the network specialists will be going on right now about latency blah blah, reliability more blah, and oh yes, security big blah blah blah.

These are all problems which future technology generations will resolve. Its impossible to imagine, for example, that applications won’t protect their own data and users robustly rather than relying on the network to do it for them. They’ll need to do so, because they won’t be able to predict what network they’ll be running on.

Why do I think that? Because they’ll be running in virtualised systems, on hardware that won’t belong to anyone that’s vetted them in advance. I’m seeing that as pretty much inevitable, really. The thing is, datacentres are such hungry beasts, gobbling up all that power and wasting most of it to do cooling. I think it will take one small island nation to drown - which could happen in the next decade, I believe - before real economic measures will be taken to expose the costs of all these cycles in countries not well suited to producing cycles.

That’s every country, by the way, that doesn’t have renewable energy supplying most of its needs and lacking environments where nature can cool the servers rather than aircon.

Countries well suited to cycle production will export them, the price will fluctuate with supply and demand, and large organisations will secure compute capacity on a futures exchange to guarantee their future costs.  As more countries become net exporters of cycles, and they get better at producing those cycles for less money, the cost of compute for corporations will tend towards nothing.

So organisations will be out of the network business, and they’ll be out of the datacentre business, and this will happen whether their IT folk like it or not. Its hard to justify any other  position when the competition is free and the CIO is expected to produce year on year cost reductions.

By the way, if that continues - the cost reductions I mean - the CIO will be needing to get to a price of nothing way sooner than a decade.

But I digress, because there are other parts of the IT estate that are certainly not free right now. What about all those end user devices that employees have to have, for example?

Well, consumerisation is well and truly king these days, and those employees will be bringing their own devices and using them. Walk around your staff and count how many people have their own laptops at work besides the one the IT folk have issued. You’ll be surprised at the percentage.What most people have at home is better than what they have at work.

If there is a way to use their at home-better stuff at work, employees will find it. Whether or not it is sanctioned.

Organisations are going to get this soon, and make it easier for this to happen. Then we’ll be seeing allowances being paid to employees to help them get the technology they want, and finally, employees will just be expected to show up with their own stuff if they want to work at all.

Tradesmen and women have been in this world for some time. They bring their own tools. Knowledge workers are about to be doing the same.

Anyway, this consumerisation is already happening in some organisations. And for those where it isn’t, it is happening underground, From a corporate perspective then, the desktop estate is going to be practically free.

What’s left?

Oh yes development. The biggest cost of any IT project. The people stuff, the code writing and so forth. Well, clearly the costs of that are in decline as well, driven mainly by the ease one can now contract labour offshore. That’s not free though.

Free development comes from your employees at the edge of organisations, however. Just as they’ll bring their own tools to work to get the job done, they’ll make new tools to help themselves get more productive. They’ll share their tools, and sooner or later you have pretty big systems that do real work.

Now, these systems may evolved without a substantive design, but if they do the job, does it really matter? I can assure you it won’t matter to the people that are doing the real work, only to the IT people whose jobs evolving systems displaces.

What’s left? Oh. Nothing.

Which brings me back to my initial question. If all this comes to pass - and it seems to me there’s every economic indication that it will - the vision needs to be sketched out now.

Planning to do more of the same for the next decade isn’t going to cut it, because that stuff is going to be over. Technological objections won’t fly, because, considering the historical pace of improvement, can anyone really think progress is going to stop in the next 10 years?

The problem here is not one of technology. It is of planners that won’t plan for anything they can’t see and touch right now. My argument is that what we need is a bit of faith in IT. Faith which is completely justified, given the track record, by the way.

We also need some acceptance of the fact that if your solution costs more than nothing, your customers will find a solution that does cost nothing. The next decade will truly bring “everything for nothing”, but not unless we get cracking now.

Or, more particularly, not unless the IT folk get cracking now. If they fail to do so, the only thing that will be free is the headcount they used to occupy before free displaced them.

Comments

[Thomas Barker]

I think getting a whole organisation out of the business of providing it's own networking/datacentres/etc is unrealistic. Most firms really do have have logistics (shipment tracking, rugged palmtops, etc), manufacturing (CAM, flow control s/ware), confidential data isolation, or some other core requirement that isn't entirely available off-the-shelf, let alone free. But there certainly large swaves, like management, that need nothing past MS Office. Those bits are the same everywhere, they can just be bought. But it's in the nature of a firm to have unique functions.

Focusing on CPU cycles is a red herring. They aren't the bottle-neck in business systems. Most systems spend all their time on I/O, so if anything, you'd expect massive consolidation *within* datacentres to economise on disk activity and storage. Not processing being dynamically relocated across continents. The bandwidth to push the data around is more expensive. CPUs are cheap.

It's not "the cloud" really - it's Moores Law finally outstripping the normal requirements of businesses. A 120 person firm can run off $5,000 of h/ware now, even if they didn't outsource anything. The cost of compute is already immaterial. Stuff like email can free online, but it doesn't make much difference to your argument if it's an appliance you can plug-in in half an hour.

(It's not cooling costs have make datacentres inefficient, it's that the average server runs at 1-7% capacity.)

As for people hacking their own business programs, it can help, it is how most useful things start, but scaling, or integrating, stuff like that... eeek!

[Anon]

Interesting thought and get the principles. However struggling to understand how until food, clothing and shelter are free how people who make the free stuff for others to consume can make a living. Nothing is free to make for others to use. The Internet is not 100% free as someone needs to be paid to keep it up and running and they use this payment to buy food, clothing and shelter.

It will be way beyond my lifetime when living costs nothing.

Or maybe I have missed the point

[Nathan Wallace]

I believe your thoughts are moving in the right direction. Disruption is hard to see and hard to explain until it has happened. (Otherwise it wouldn't be a disruption.)

If you haven't already, be sure to read this article about Google and the way they are moving costs to less than free.

Google Redefines Disruption: The “Less Than Free” Business Model « abovethecrowd.com http://bit.ly/3KRaF2