Data Dancing Drama

Well, it’s been a while since I posted something on the technology world- but guess what I just got inspired again! Who knew? Anyway, I was uninspired by the (lack) of development in the “philosophy” of technology for a number of years now.

What do I mean by that? Well, I started my IT career in the 1980′s. If ever there was a period of ferment that was one. I used to read a venerable magazine called BYTE, which frankly, caused an indentation in the floor when the postman put it through the mailbox. It gave me headaches, but I loved it, after an aspirin or two. Why? Because I read the damn thing cover to cover until I understood all the technology, as best I could anyway.

At that time, a new development or technology would come along, that literally six months later, maybe, would be a radically different commercial application. For the last decade the IT world has been in the wilderness of corporate boring.

Yes, the Open Source world has been fun, until Oracle bought Sun and trashed everything in sight, but that was just boring corporate megalomania. It was not geeky enough, for me anyway.

So back to my inspiration.  I think we are seeing the edges of a new world where Codd & Date do not rule data storage. If that was too obscure and shows my age, well, then I think we are seeing the the beginnings of a massive paradigm shift in storage. You see, we now store tons of stuff online.

for now, Google, Amzazon, et al, use conventional RDBMS’s but you know what? Or most regularly used computing device does not. No its not your laptop. It’s your mobile.

I see a gradual move towards light, possibly Object oriented databases in mobile devices and big large dinosaur RDBMS’s in servers in the clouds.

So what? that’s obvious- sure it is as far as it goes. Here’s what comes next. I’d like you to think back, say 15 years. Who used mobile phones? Very few. They were just payphones that you carried with you.

Today, the mobile gadgets are the most popular way to connect to the Internet. Think about it for a moment, the most popular way to connect to the Internet. More popular than desktops. This has all happened in just a few short years.

Could you live without Facebook or Twitter? Arguable, perhaps these days. What I see happening next is the “distributed web” where we take “our” Facebook with us offline for when we are not connected to the Net. The Internet may be almost ubiquitous, but the cost to make it totally permeate the planet is a far too expensive “last mile”.

Yet we travel more- there is likely not going to be radically new expansions of mobile Internet access, which is already patchy. We therefore will demand to have offline access to “our” data.

you can bet Oracle will not run well on an iPhone. Goodness, it barely runs well on a monster server. There has been no radical change in the storage technology we use for over 45 years, from a philosophical point of view.

Now there is and the push was not geeky, but social. Social media will change the way we interact with technology in exactly the same pervasive way the mobile phone did 20 years ago. This might all seem obvious to you, but the ramifications are huge- IT got unpredictable again. Partly, because it is no longer “IT” but mobile Internet.

Next I’ll get into mobile development tools for Android, iPhone, Blackberry and others. I’m about to start another journey of discovery, at last. The last decade of corporate bullshit is a bit like John Lennon’s interview in “Rolling Stone” (I think) just before he was killed, when he was asked what he thought of the 70′s he said “the 70′s were a drag”. That’s how I feel about the 90′s and most of the 2000′s.

You see there’s one bit of secret sauce I did not mention: mobile apps can and are built successfully by one person, or a small team. No longer do we have to have budgets of millions, gazillion Sun servers and 50 Java coders to make something that in the 1980′s a developer in Clipper, Modula-2 or C++ could do in the same time. There’s hope yet.