Device independence and the future of mobility

Dave Buchholz, Technology Evangelist, Intel IT, and I had a interesting romp through the history of systems and how things have changed over the years. It was wonderful to meet a fellow computer archeologist! Then, based upon recent trends, we considered where things are likely to go. Some of that discussion touched upon a paper that Dave and a number of his colleagues over at Intel have published. If you'd like to download and read this white paper click here.

Here are some of the interesting conclusions we discussed.

• New generations of users are used to working with applications and data "in the clouds" and have come to expect immediate access to whatever it is they are seeking.
• They expect to be able to get to information of interest from anywhere, at anytime, using whatever device they'd like to use.
• These users have little patience and won't wait for what they want.  If it is not available from one source, they'll simply hunt it up somewhere else.
• They have little tolerance for canned one-size-fits-all solutions and insist on customized solutions.
• They have little understanding of or interest in a historical view of how things have worked in the past. If they don't like something, they won't use it or will find some way to modify it to their liking.
• They're used to sharing their viewpoints and opinions and expect that they'll be considered.
• They're used to working with the device and computing environment that they choose and expect that the data and applications will fit themselves to the chosen environment. When one considers how many different mobile and desktop environments are in use in any given organization, the prospects are pretty daunting for IT.
• Organizations, in many cases, have ignored this trend and continue to offer packaged, this-is-the-way-we-do-it-here solutions and seem surprised when people ignore them and do something else.
• Security is increasingly a challenge in this environment and the resolution this may require virtual processing, virtual I/O and other functions be built into the system hardware.

It occurred to me after the discussion, that I've heard many of these same things when speaking to futurists from Citrix, VMware and a few others.