This is my thesis for today’s post: Geek toys are important for the future of digital convergence.
2010 will be a year where we will obviously see unprecedented leaps in the availability of geek toys. As you are all aware, CES is happening and a few well timed launches are expected. The general themes are extremely clear, thanks to a few “leaks” to the press this year. Consumers are expecting a huge explosion of devices in ‘tablet form’ as well as a dollop of mobile computing devices based on the Android mobile application ecosystem. In essence we are all expecting 2010 to be full of ultra powerful, low power, beautifully designed tablet ‘like’ devices that look like they came off the latest set of a Star Trek episode. All of these juicy play things will be delivering waves of toy induced Geek euphoria among the masses for months to come. Will I be partaking in this geek fest? Absolutely, I’ll be one of the early adopters rocking a Nexus One, but that’s not really the point of my post.
From a consumer standpoint, the entire internet and our entire digital lives are converging into devices like the Nexus One and the Apple tablet. That’s amazing when you consider that these devices are essentially a “piece of glass” with a wireless interface, a processor, some kind of solid state memory and a camera. This has been enabled by huge leaps in battery technology, low power computing, but more importantly the richness the “cloud” or essentially what the internet has to offer us on these new types of devices.
The contrast is that, from an IT systems management perspective, the stack used to deliver business services, and ultimately, the content and services to these endpoints gets exponentially more complex and layered with every iteration in the design of the devices. The iterations are also getting faster, as the race to conquer this wild west arena heats among all the usual suspects.
So, this is going to be great for consumers. We are going to see an explosion of different operating system variants, hardware paradigms, and new ways of consuming media. The question becomes, how many IT decision makers are already wondering, what will the impact of people wanting to rock an “ISlate” at work be? What will be the impact of having to provide more and more business services over the wire to mobile platforms like Android, Apple’s mobile tablet OS, Chrome on the Google Tablet (and the list will go on and on for 2010) be? What will be the business impact of having to monitor all the new infrastructure or SAAS based services needed to manage these devices from a corporate policy perspective? How about even the basics of trying to monitor the explosion of different kinds of endpoints themselves as they penetrate the enterprise? We all remember that the IPhone was initially a consumer only device, that later penetrated the enterprise with impunity. Most of my posts end with the same question – are you ready?
