Hot topics and trends

This entry summarizes the major topics that are driving this industry. It is intended to provide an overview of these subjects for the newcomer to the field as well as the person who has been away from the field for some time.

There may be only slight changes to this entry with each new software release, because this is not a "What's the Latest News" section. It is here to highlight the subject areas that people in the computer industry spend much of their time dealing with.

Web 2.0
The most highly talked about aspect of Web 2.0 is user-generated content, in which everyone is publishing material about everything. Blogs (personal journals) and wikis (user-created and user-edited content) let anyone with a computer publish their beliefs and opinions about anything. Video sharing sites let anyone with a video camera and computer capture scenes about anything and share them with the world at large.

The "user rules", or "the amateur rules," depending on your point of view. Web 2.0 levels the playing field for entry into the world of publishing; however, it also adds tons more information in a world too full of rumor and opinion and too empty of meaningful content and reason. As is brought out in Andrew Keen's "The Cult of the Amateur," when everyday users are allowed to report the news under pseudonyms or anonymously and are not held accountable for anything they say, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell truth from fiction. Professional journalists and editors, even those with immense fame, can be criticized and even fired for false reporting. The contributing user can write anything and never be held responsible.

Like all things in this fast-paced, high-tech world, Web 2.0 will settle down to reality. In the meantime, it is one of the hottest topics and trends. See Web 2.0.

Software As a Service (SaaS)
Expected to become more mainstream as the 21st century began, software as a Web-based service is indeed gaining ground. It is the thin client computing model, in which the programs, and quite possibly the data, come from a Web server, and the universal interface is the Web browser. As CPU chips increase in speed, a user's computer is able to execute Java and JavaScript code a whole lot faster than before. Programming enhancements such as AJAX also enable JavaScript-based Web pages to function like a traditional application that runs on a user's machine. See AJAX.

The thin client model is very appealing to IT departments. It implies that all software updates are handled by a third-party service organization at their facilities. Although less likely, company data could also be stored on third-party servers that are automatically backed up on a routine schedule.

The question is whether companies will let critical application software come from the Internet. If their connections to the Internet or some chunk of the Internet itself were compromised for a period of time, their business could come to a halt. If the same applications had to be maintained locally in case of Internet failure, then the IT department has now doubled its responsibility rather than eliminated much of it. Time will tell if software as a service will cut heavily into local software implementations. Many believe it to be the next major wave. See Web 2.0 and thin client.

Wireless
With the Internet delivering us a global transport for information, we are now hooked on getting our e-mail, stock quotes and up-to-the-minute news no matter where we are. The latter part of the 1990s witnessed a huge increase in wireless communications, which continues to gather steam.

Wireless LANs and hotspots have become extremely popular and either function as a convenient way to access the Internet, or they work like a mini cellphone system, enabling users to roam from building to building while keeping a network connection (see wireless LAN).

In Europe, GSM was the first cellular technology to support data as part of its original design, but all other cellular systems have followed suit. Cellular 3G modems in laptops compete with wireless LANs and have the advantage of coverage almost everywhere in the country. Wireless hotspots may be common, but are not ubiquitous. See cellular generations and wireless glossary.

Web Services and XML
Starting at the turn of the century, Web services has been a hot buzzword. Web services links two parties together over the Web such as buyers and sellers or seekers of information and the information itself. The XML and SOAP protocols provide the transport mechanism so that requests can be made and answers retrieved. However, what sets Web services apart in a public environment is the UDDI system, which is used to register a service so that any inquiring party can find it. After automatic discovery of a service somewhere on the Web, there has to be automatic information exchange.

The XML markup language has become the standard for defining text and data structures over the Web. From the day it was first introduced, this text-based tag language was touted as a panacea; however, the only thing standard about XML is its structure. What is defined by that structure is an agreement between businesses about how they describe each detail of a transaction. The real key to Web services, and the hard work, is agreeing on the definitions of all these data elements that are passed back and forth for a specific application within an industry. There are literally millions of possibilities when you think of all the ways consumers and businesses can interact with each other.

The Internet has brought the world together in a unique way. Web services and XML have the potential for extending it into a global processing environment unlike anything we could have imagined a few years ago. Stay tuned! See Web services and SOA.

Windows Security Patches
Because Microsoft is a huge, profit-oriented company, hackers make it the target of their attacks. Each destructive event is a soapbox against big companies and profits and the promotion of open source (free software). They feel causing everyone a massive amount of inconvenience and downtime makes a statement. Naturally, they don't see themselves as "terrorists," they see themselves as "freedom fighters" (but, of course). While this may be a minor inconvenience for one user who downloads a new patch once a week via Windows Update on the Web, for large corporations, managing Windows security updates is a major maintenance headache.

Although Microsoft is constantly derided for its security loopholes, if hackers went after the Mac or Linux with the same vengeance, they would also find flaws. In the past, nobody programmed software thinking about a constant barrage of attacks. From now on, new versions of operating systems are designed for this onslaught.

The Information Superhighway
Nothing in the computer and communications industries, or perhaps even in the world at large, ever came onto the scene with more momentum than the World Wide Web. In the early 1990s, the Clinton/Gore administration was touting the "information superhighway," pointing to the Internet as a model for a future system. However, the excitement over the Web turned the Internet into the superhighway whether it was ready for it or not. The simplicity of the Web's hyperlink, an address that points to another Web page on the same server or on any server in the world, spread like wildfire.

As a result, there was hardly any company that had not rethought its strategies in an e-commerce world. Almost every software product was affected, and every application was reworked to deal with the Internet in some manner. Of course, thousands of new terms have been added to this reference as a result.

Even with its growing pains, the Internet has managed to become the global superhighway changing the lives of millions. That it works as well as it does is indeed quite miraculous. With less than 500 Web sites in 1994 to tens of millions today, the Web has become the information melting pot for the planet. It provides a central marketplace and meeting ground for every subject known to the human race.

The real superhighway was meant to modernize the telecommunications infrastructure in the U.S. so that everyone had access to information and educational materials no matter what their station in life. Although access is available in libraries and other public venues, you still need a computer and have to pay an Internet provider if you want access in your home.

The fury has died down somewhat, because not only has the Internet become mainstream, but the dot-com stock market frenzy of the late 1990s saw absurd valuations driven down to reality, if not to zero. Nevertheless, the Internet and the Web are still in their infancy. See World Wide Web, cable Internet and IP on Everything.

The Intranet
The Internet spawned the Web, and the Web gave birth to the intranet, an inhouse, private Web site that uses the same protocols and browsers as the external Web. Employees can access the intranet, but outside users cannot.

In addition to using Web-style pages and links, the JavaScript, VBScript and Java languages enable the intranet to host full-blown applications with the advantage that, once programmed, they can run in Windows, Mac and Linux desktops.

The intranet has become the focal point for all information resources within an organization, and a myriad of applications have been reworked to use the browser as the universal interface. The Internet declared a world standard for information distribution. It only made sense to bring it inhouse.

Multimedia and Storage
Multimedia is the use of pictures, voice and video along with traditional text. It is a major catalyst that forces hardware vendors to make faster and more capacious hardware and software vendors to develop innovative algorithms that compress the bits even more. A page of text takes up five thousand bytes of storage in a computer, but a high-resolution image can take millions.

The Web took off because it could display graphics, not just text. It then evolved into a multimedia delivery system for audio, video, telephone, fax and videoconferencing. Multimedia excites us. We want pictures and animation.

A DVD movie takes up about 5GB, rendering older 40GB and 80GB hard disks worthless for video storage. While earlier disk drives might not have been large enough to hold sufficient applications, today's multi-gigabyte hard disks are strained with graphics and videos. Datacenter storage has always been vital in the IT department, but desktop storage has become a key resource for users. See storage.

Client/Server and Downsizing
Throughout the 1990s, new information systems were developed for Windows-based PCs connected by local area networks (LANs) rather than the central computer architecture of mainframes and minicomputers. Although mainframes perform an enormous amount of daily processing in organizations, the trend in the late 1980s and early 1990s was to migrate older systems and develop new ones to client/server architectures. Client/server primarily means storing the database management systems (DBMSs) on the server and using the client workstations to access them (see client/server).

A major incentive for downsizing to LANs was the wide availability of client/server applications and sources for purchasing PC hardware. Client workstations were mostly Windows-based PCs, and the servers were PCs running Windows NT/2000 or NetWare or a Sun, HP or IBM server running Unix.

Although hardware costs may have been less than minis and mainframes, many organizations discovered that maintenance costs for client/server architectures were considerably higher than expected. Along came the Web, and the client part of client/server often turned into the Web browser, which provides a platform-independent, universal interface for accessing data. Client/server systems, which replaced legacy information systems in the early 1990s, became legacy themselves if they were not upgraded to use the Web in some manner.

Networking
Networking is the backbone of an organization's high-tech infrastructure. The combined demands of client/server applications, multimedia, e-mail, intranets and the Internet just continue to push the envelope. In addition, tying together heterogeneous networks from different departments, subsidiaries and divisions is a daunting task for network administrators and IS managers.

Three trends have taken place in networking since the mid-1990s (1) replacing shared media networks with switches, (2) developing high-speed backbones and (3) switching to TCP/IP as the standard protocol. Ethernet hubs share all the bandwidth between attached stations. Ethernet switches dramatically increase capacity by giving each pair of users the total bandwidth. They also allow for virtual LANs, which make network administration simpler.

Network backbones are always being upgraded to higher speeds with technologies such as Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet. The network is the lifeblood of enterprise information systems and continues to be the most complex of all operations. See enterprise networking.

Groupware
Groupware is software that lets users share and collaborate. The heart of a groupware system is e-mail, which is used to notify and alert team members on a daily basis. The primary data collaboration tools are electronic whiteboards, which is a shared "chalkboard," and application sharing, which lets remote users work in the same application together. Some form of human communication is also necessary, so either text chat, audio or videoconferencing becomes part of the total system.

Groupware vendors have consolidated a host of collaboration and conferencing features. Products such as Lotus Notes, GroupWise and Microsoft Exchange were created as front ends to groupware activities. They include e-mail and some combination of collaboration tools as well as document sharing, group calendaring and scheduling and personal information management.

The Internet brought groupware into focus. Fueled by the ease with which HTML pages can be created and shared, organizations routinely publish millions of intranet pages. Increasingly, the data on these pages is extracted from corporate databases.

As the data becomes more integral to the daily operation of the business, problems surface. What happens when the documents are distributed to remote servers? Which ones are the latest? Who keeps them up-to-date? What starts out as a simple method of electronically publishing internal documents winds up becoming a strategic information system requiring the same care and attention as the data processing systems that have been deployed for decades.

For years, we have been building our local networks. We are now turning them into global internets (small "i") using the Internet (big "I") as the transport. Group collaboration was a logical next step.

Hardware Costs
The price of hardware continues to plummet. Each year, we get more computer per dollar than we did the year before. Over the past couple of years, memory chip prices have dropped considerably. When compared to just a few years ago, technology seems to be a huge bargain. However, hardware costs are misleading, because our requirements continue to increase as rapidly as costs decrease.

In addition, we focus on CPU speed, and although it's marvelous that a 2 GHz dual-core system costs less than $1,000 these days, top-end systems cost a lot more. If you want your electronic desktop to just begin to approach the size of a real desk, equip the PC with two 22" monitors, and the system jumps to $1,700. Add fault-tolerant RAID disks, and you have reached $2,000. How about a heavy duty case with heat pipes instead of noisy fans for silent computing? Total cost $3,000.

Laptops command a premium over desktop machines. A fully configured, high-end laptop costs from $2,000 to $3,000. A ruggedized laptop can reach $5,000 and more.

Do we need all this power? The irony is that much of this great new speed goes up in smoke as more novice programmers make changes to software that has been modified countless times and patched over and over again. This is why the next version of your favorite application is often slower than the previous one. While it is impossible to add functionality ad infinitum without paying some performance penalty, it takes experienced developers to keep new features from slowing everything to a crawl. Veteran developers are increasingly harder to find because by the time they become true experts, they are ready to retire.

In almost every company, a user is attached to an internal network that is ever expanding. More Internet usage requires faster connections. The general complexity of networking means more inhouse expertise or third-party consulting. Although there is a vast amount of off-the-shelf software for myriad requirements, even the smallest organizations often have special needs. Custom programming ranges from $75 to $150 an hour, and consultants cost $150 to $300 an hour. Add up a few weeks of third-party people time, and the cost of the PC looks like chump change.

Half the Equation

This adage has been used in the computer field for years, but tells only one side of the story. Hardware may be cheap by comparison, but people costs are not, and worldwide computing requirements are increasing rapidly.

End of hot topics.