In the distant past of the year 1993, when I was but a wee scrap of a lad at eleven years old, I saw the future emblazoned in black and white print. An advert in the latest issue of ‘Personal Computer World’ shone out at me like a beacon, lighting the way to tomorrow – the Amstrad PenPad PDA600, a touchscreen PDA no bigger than a typical paperback book, with handwriting recognition, a stylus, and all sorts of glorious applications for storing data and keeping notes. I had to have it.
This was the same year that Windows 3.11 and the Pentium processor hit the market in giant desktop PCs, in a world where only fifty web servers existed, the name UNIX was first officially recognised, and the first ever webcam was connected to the tiny, tiny internet. Personal computing was not mainstream, and portable computing was non-existent, as far as I was aware. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Apple were also releasing their Newton range of devices in 1993, a product line which would see similar limited market penetration as the Amstrad PenPad, but which would eventually become the spiritual ancestors to the iPad, the device which brought the age of compute mobility to the masses.
After much pleading and cajoling, my beleaguered parents dutifully presented me with my PenPad at my next birthday, on the condition that as an expensive piece of cutting-edge technology it would never leave the house. Obviously it left the house. Often.
The feeling from that time that to this day has never left me isn’t the wonder I felt at using the PenPad, or the sci-fi feeling I felt as I showed it off to all and sundry in the playground, it’s the feeling of dejection I felt at the utter lack of interest shown in it by my peers. It was amazing and perplexing to me how completely disinterested twelve year old children could be when presented such a device of infinite wonder, as if the present was somehow rich and full enough to be explored on its own – clearly lunacy.
Fast-forward twenty plus years, and the promise of the vision of the PenPad, the Newton, and their brethren is finally fulfilled through the device which finally struck rose gold and brought portable touchscreen computing to the masses – the iPad. Given its heritage, perhaps the iPad’s tagline should have been something to do with standing on the shoulders of giants…
Few could have predicted how that vision would finally explode into mass consumption, or that Apple would end up popularising it, paving the way for the iPad, Android tablets, and Windows hybrid devices to revolutionise the way we consume and create through technology today.
It was, however, obvious for many years just how great the potential of a device like that done right could be. So it is with many advancements in technologies today, from augmented, virtual, and mixed reality, to analytics and machine learning, the internet of things, artificial intelligence, wearables, blockchain technology, and so on… We have a seemingly never-ending list of technologies which have flowed from the Peak of Inflated Expectations through the Trough of Disillusionment and are now entering the Slope of Enlightenment on their way to actually being useful.
How then, if like with the iPad in the days of the PenPad it’s impossible to know the ‘right horse to back’, can we effectively prepare for a future in which these technologies and more augment and revolutionise our lives and our businesses without just waiting and seeing?
If I had to offer one piece of advice, it would probably be three pieces of advice – plan for security, plan for 100% uptime, assume distributed data as the norm. As long as you always maintain an exit strategy and have the ability to pivot quickly as the pace of technology innovation continues to accelerate, your platform of today becomes less relevant, while the aforementioned holy trinity of platform agnosticism, if treated with reverence, will serve well into the future.
As cloud, analytics, machine learning, the IoT, distributed data, a mobile workforce and more move to become the new normal, data security and uptime evolve from being ‘just’ critical considerations, into a core pillar and underpinning of any business, and any datacentre and technology strategy should hold them at its absolute core.
So then if I had one ask, it would be not to be my twelve year old peers, focused on the here and now to the exclusion of the needs of the future, because while we can’t predict what’s coming next, we can absolutely plan and build for it. A security and business continuity strategy which is designed to hold data access, integrity, and availability with the utmost regard, while simultaneously enabling rather than hindering business benefits from analytics and the like will reap huge benefits into the future, regardless of the company or technology which proves the victor or vanguard in enabling those benefits.
Probably. Like I say, I’m not prescient.
Kenny Lowe is head of emerging technologies at Brightsolid.
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