What "Waves of Change" is about is the coming convergence of a set of technologies that will first enable, then force another transition in our lives. This is often referred to as a 'sea change', a transition to a new environment that is not reversible. Once the sea change is past, nothing short of global catastrophe will reverse the process.
The Internet is one such sea change and yet we have only seen the initial impacts of the Web. What enabled the web was the convergence of a maturing high speed digital communications network with the maturing of high performance digital computers and graphics.
These two technologies were catalyzed by the desire of some physicists to be able to examine physics data remotely. From this a new method of communications, the web server and browser, was born. Joined at the hip was an older technology - email. These technologies have already transformed the world.
Now the convergence is not of two, but five developing technologies. By comparison with the Web wave, the coming sea change will be a Tsunami. How these things happen and which technologies are involved is the subject of Part I.
Over the course of four or five years in technology, new and enhanced methods and processes accumulate until their incremental improvements allow a new level of applications to be delivered economically. These quantitative improvements accumulate until they make a qualitative difference, a jump to a new level of capability.
Once we reach that new level, applications are enabled by combinations of technologies that were not economic or even possible earlier. Such level jumps in the past have enabled the current Ethernet and TCP/IP structure of the Internet as one component of our global web. Another component jump for the web was the graphical web browser, driven by a jump in microcomputers and graphics chips.
With the advent of TCP/IP, invented for ARPANET in the 1970s, joined with the commonality of Ethernet as a local interconnect and high speed communications lines at affordable prices, the communications infrastructure for the Internet was born.
As the various Internet components reached completion in the 1990s, a whole new industry was born, and grew to maturity, boom and bust in an astonishingly short period of time - a mere decade. Prior transitions were lethargic by comparison. In transportation, rail technology in the 19th century took a hundred years to mature. Similarly, aircraft in the 20th century took more than fifty years. Now we race ahead even faster to the next major development, driven in large part by the power and speed of the Web.
These developments will create new industries sooner than anyone expects. In the rest of this article, I will identify these trends and components along with recent developments which point the way to the next big surprise.
One interesting example of a level jump is that of graphic chips. In 1991, graphics was a small segment of the market just beginning to be driven by the new Graphic User Interfaces (GUI). This timeframe was just at the introduction of the Intel 486.
New operating systems and applications had been growing based on the capabilities of the i386 and as usual, they were pushing the limits of that chip. Memory costs had come back down to around $100/megabyte and you could get eight to sixteen megabytes in the larger motherboards. This was usually done by one or two full size expansion cards in special slots.
At this time Windows 3.0 and OS/2 2.0 had just arrived and Unix systems had X-Windows in proprietary implementations. Graphics cards were quite capable for text, but full screen graphics were limited and slow. Most graphic cards had 256K of memory and connected to the ISA bus, not a happy combination for high performance.
As the GUI enabled more people to use a computer without extensive training or intelligence, the market for graphics cards grew, economies of scale enabled cheaper cards and that grew the whole market. What was once an unimportant component had become a multi-billion dollar industry that will soon deliver graphic chips that are more powerful than the main processor chip.
Recent developments this year in the graphics chip market have reached a level jump. The new joint IBM - Sony development, originally a graphics chip design for the Playstation 3, has started a whole new approach to system processors called the 'Cell' chip, where multiple cores on a single chip can be dynamically assigned to tasks on a fine grain basis. This is not the same as two independent cpus on one chip, such as IBM's Power 4. The Cell chip is more flexible and less expensive.
I'll skip briefly over the introduction of the PCI video cards because it represents an increase in capability that drove 3D applications and games, but that was only a quantitative change. However, the AGP bus in combination with fast video memory and 100 million gate graphics chips has delivered us to a new level (qualitative) of realism in 3D.
This includes very realistic games and multiple HDTV channels on a single system. We are now at the gateway of having digital TV which combines real and synthetic scenes that will be difficult to separate visually. The potential for entertainment is immense, as is the potential for abuse.
This is an example of improvements in performance that accumulate over time to enable capabilities that represent a whole new class of applications. While synthetic scenes have been done with clusters of systems, it has been a specialist Hollywood movie market priced way beyond the mass market. The capabilities are here today in top end systems and latest video chips. By the time movie makers use of this capability, it will already be on most desktops.
The next section of this analysis will discuss current and near term technology developments. It will cover:
These technologies are each reaching a transition to a new level, not quite in sync, but close. That synchronization is an unplanned and unexpected result of the Internet. The web in which we live and communicate today has overcome barriers and closed loops in the business and personal communications process.
What once took days for mail, weeks for magazines, months for journals and years for books, now happens in minutes. From thought to text to HTML to web, in minutes. Now the longest time to create something new is the process of creation itself!
This is a real revolution in communications and it has already had dramatic consequences in business and our lives. Companies who reacted too slowly to the new environment have fallen behind or even disappeared. Supply chain management, Just In Time manufacturing, and online ordering are just a few of the changes in business, driven by the Internet.
Yet all of these changes have been caused by the convergence of just two technologies, computers and communications. What will happen when the five technologies listed above converge?
The only thing we can be sure of is that it will have massive impact. I mean by this that it will change our world more dramatically than the revolutionary changes brought about by the Internet. My predictions will probably overstate the short term and understate the long term. This is a natural result of the nature of technology growth.
All technologies grow in a manner described by the S curve. They start at slow growth for a variable time, reach an inflection point where growth accelerates to the steep part of the curve. Eventually growth slows, levels off and finally decays as each technology is overtaken by new developments.
My analysis of convergence and its and predictions of its consequences will be elaborated in Part III.