Abstraction

Conveniently located down the street from my office is the Computer History Museum, which has a huge exhibit devoted to the evolution of computers. Just as you enter this room, on the wall to the right, is an abacus display. Continue walking and the exhibit provides a mind boggling chronology of computing, including ENIAC machines, 10Meg hard drives as big as my car, Cray supercomputers, and finally the Apple ][, TRS-80s, Atari 800s, and the PC.

By the way, if (like me) you see “TRS-80″ and immediately think “trash 80,” you’re showing your age.

My favorite part of the exhibit, by far, is the display of the more recent (say, ‘85-’95) computing devices, the ones that I used as a kid. It’s fun to look at at an 1200 baud modem and remember dialing up BBSs.

It’s fun, too, to think of how things have changed. In my mind, computing technology evolves in a kind of punctuated equilibrium (with apologies to Stephen Jay Gould). I’m not referring to Moore’s Law as an evolutionary concept, I mean dramatic, changes-everything evolution.

In my lifetime, there have been two of these. The first was the emergence of the PC as a common household tool. The second, of course, was the introduction of the Internet and the browser.

We are at the cusp of a third revolution, one even more significant than the others. It’s not really about the hyped concepts du jour: Web2.0, or IMS, or platforms (although all three of these are made possible by the emerging technologies). This revolution is more fundamental than that: it’s about the distribution of media, all media, via the network. I think the implications for this are truly mind blowing.

Traditional channels for media delivery exist because there was no alternative: CDs, DVDs, shrink-wrapped software, all exist because it was the most effective way to get media from the producer to the consumer. All of these will largely be gone within a decade: CompUSA will no longer sell software, Blockbuster will no longer have brick and mortar stores, music and film distributors will finally give up physically recorded media completely, television will be completely IP based.

The music and movie side to this phenomenon is well known, but truly amazing new businesses are announced daily. Ooma, for example, or Pano Logic, or Zonbu.

To date, all of the attention related to this third wave (if you will) has been focused on the services (the web2.0 and etc.) I mentioned briefly above. And yes, those companies I linked above are cool and amazing. But they aren’t the real winners.

But the real money, by and large, is gonna be made elsewhere: by the folks that make the networks and the network management, billing, and security systems. These are the systems that make it all possible; the technology that’s invisible and expected to perform faultlessly, like the telephone system. Pick up the receiver, and you get a dial tone every time.