World Stream computing to replace the Web

I came across an interesting article by David Gelernter.  Gerlenter, a Yale Professor, who co-introduced the term "lifestreams" in the 199o-ies, proceeds in the same spirit and talks about "worldstreams" which he defines as a collection of heterogeneous real-time messaging stream  (may be thought as a collection of streams).   His prophecy is that this will be a disruptive technology for the web, browsers, search, operating systems.  We will no longer surf in sites and search the web,  but we'll browse the worldstream, and ask the worldstream to bring us what we want, in the time we want it, instead of search for it.    The event processing grand challenge, which was part of the event processing manifesto,  and talked about the "event fabric" was similar in nature, but the manifesto authors did not claim that the web will be replaced,  it will probably not happen in one step anyway.    However -- certainly interesting observation, and promises bright future...

On the innovator's dilemma

Today, while trying to update a presentation, I found out that Powerpoint on my laptop somehow became corrupted, I pinged our friendly system guys, who took my laptop for 2.5 hours, and returned it after reinstalling MS-Office in worse shape (now it does not recognize Excell, and has also problems in Word), so tomorrow morning on the way to the dentist, I'll drop the laptop again with the friendly system guys, hoping they'll do better that time.   In some of the spare time, I had meeting, but it part of it I realized that everything I do somehow involves this laptop, so I decided to catch up on a book I started to read long time ago and never finished-  Clayton Christensen's book on the innovator's dilemma.   This is a classic book, published in 1997 that somebody recommended me to read several years ago.    


My of my favorite topics is the topic of disruptive technologies.  Christensen provides several reasons why it is difficult for big companies to create disruptive technologies, though they are those who damage the most.
Some of the reasons are:

1. Companies depend on customers for resources:  disruptive technologies are developed not as part of customer requirement  (this reminds me that somebody in IBM said 6-7 years ago about event processing that this is hallucination of research folks.
2. Small markets don't solve the growth need of large companies:  since there is investors/analysts pressure on each company to grow steadily,  from short term growth considerations, disruptive technologies are not attractive to the organization, not growing it in the short run.
3. Markets that don't exist cannot be analyzed - when investment require analyst support and hard-core figures, they may not exist
4. An organization's capabilities define its disabilities:   processes that fit the "business as usual" work, may not be appropriate for developing disruptive technologies
5. Technology supply may not equal market demands:   companies often don't identify the gaps in their own products, or trying to improve them incrementally, thus expose themselves to disruptive technologies that close these gaps

These five principles are the introduction, the rest of the book deals with methodology for organization to be able to create disruptive technologies.    

More on disruptive technologies

Hello from Brussels -- I'll spend the next couple of days in reviewing two EU projects, one here in Brussels and the other in Dortmund, Germany -  3.5 hours train ride from here.    


I have written about disruptive technologies before, one of my favorite topics in fact.  
Yesterday there were two events that reminded me of this, the first one was visiting Better Place, An Israeli company,  founded by Shai Agassi,  a person I met when he was still young, and got to be one of the senior leaders of SAP.   His vision is the vision of electric car, and the company, as seen in the slide above, is an infrastructure company which provides charging, automatic battery replacement and some other goodies.  They intend to start commercial use of their cars (currently they work with Renault as a manufacturer) at the end of the year,  this is indeed a disruptive technology over the current models of energy consumption in cars, and also of the leasing model of cars.     We'll see if this trend will catch.


The other event was an interview with Eitan Wertheimer,  chairman of the board of Iscar, and known Israeli industrialist, who said in that interview that whenever he launches a product, he kicks-off a team to establish a disruptive product that will make it obsolete.  This seems to go against the genetics of business -- since the goal of any business is to make money out of its products, and not try to defeat it.     His reasoning was that for every technology somebody will work on defeating it,  and it is better be us and not our competitors.  
I like this line of reasoning,  the technology world moves fast, and if one wants to be a leader, then it must lead   
new developments all the time.    


I always saw our mission in IBM Research to create disruptive technologies rather than incrementally advance existing ones, I think we are doing some of these, but not enough.   Our current project is certainly in that direction.   

On EDA, CEP and disruptive technology

This is the second time in the last few months that the term "disruptive technology" is being used, this time by Mark Palmer who adds his voice to the EDA vs. CEP discussion. Mark acknowledges the fact that EDA and CEP are not synonyms, but asserting that CEP is the disruptive part of EDA.

Recall that in the Oracle Blog the "disruptive" word was used recently and I have discussed it at that time; Richard Veryard has answered my response claiming that "disruptive" is often not better, at least not in the short run.

Anyway, I have noticed in the recent few weeks, two IBM customers who made plans to move to EDA (neither will use CEP, at least not in the short run). The shift to EDA is a fundamental change in the architecture thinking with the introduction of the decoupled event-driven thinking. Is it new ? - not really. Is it new for these customers - yes, not only new, but a significant change in thinking, it is an indication that there is a beef in EDA, even without introducing CEP, that the enterprise should digest. While thinking in events is natural in the daily life, it is still not natural for enterprise architecture and programming paradigm.

Bottom line -- while CEP certainly has its merits (if the customer has mature enough to digest it), EDA seems to be a more fundamental change in thinking relative to the alternative, and has its own beef. More - Later.

On Patagonia Dinosaurs and Disruptive Technologies

Saturday night, at home in Haifa. Today I went along with (most of) my family to visit the fossils of some Patagonia Dinosaurs . The exhibition took place in the local technology museum, and since the last time I've been there, I noticed that they have eliminated the museum's parking lot, asking the visitors to find parking in the center city -- which is not easy even in regular days, and becoming more difficult when many people somehow have the same idea that they wish to spend Saturday noon in looking at old lizards... Anyway, after two rounds I have found a good parking place, making a note that there are soon elections for the mayor of Haifa.

Anyway, looking at the fossils, among the many people who were there, I also looked at a poster explaining the various assumptions why these animals became extinct.

This has drawn me to thinking in two directions -- when will humanity become extinct, and getting back into technology -- when does disruptive technology makes previous technologies obsolete? in our case -- will we have a second (or third) generation of event processing technologies which will be disruptive for everything that exists today ? --- well, we can only speculate at this point, but it is a good topic to think about... This can be one of the topics that we'll ask the senior technologist panel in the EPTS F2F meeting. More - Later.