How much does tech help?

I spend my life surrounded by technology, working with a tech start up and living in one of the worlds larger cities, I can’t avoid being connected. But as I sit right now on a train passing through the British and then French countryside on the Eurostar I see the fields and fields of farming and old world cottages. I would never be on this train if it was not for my career in technology, going from one meeting to a conference in another country is a blessing no doubt, but am I really making a difference? To that point, are any of us involved in technology, supporting the latest buzzword, having an impact on the world at large. And more importantly are we making the world better

These are the thoughts I have been pondering and as i see classic farmland and beautiful scenery, the first reaction is that I am having no impact on how these people live, but then I started to look deeper into it. Most likely, I will never meet the farmer and his family living in the cottage we just passed, or the butcher that will make sure those same families are fed but that does not mean that we in technology have no impact. Some of these homes were built hundreds of years ago, yet they all have electricity and running water now, something unheard of when they were built. At the time electricity was nothing but a buzzword. Has the farmers life been impacted by the many many points of data stored from the “internet of things”, surely it has. Better weather forecasts, faster methods of selling their goods, all of these are things that the farmer enjoys. They make a difference in his life.

Does it matter that I work for a company that has a mantra that we can change the way data is stored, of course it does. The ability to store more data and process it faster could some day help the farmer and the butcher know that there may be a storm that could impact the crops and the herds of sheep that we watch pass by. I often get asked, what keeps me motivated to try to stay on the cutting edge of technology. It is sometimes amazing that the only time I get to stop and think of an answer about technology is when I am disconnected from the very technology world I live in.

To all those that ask why I travel so much or how I keep pushing, just make sure you take the few minutes to disconnect and look out the window at the farms and the small villages. They would easily exist without new technology, but can we as technologist make their life better or longer? That might be the ultimate question, but for me, the answer is yes and I hope some day to be involved with something that has as much impact as electricity.

What to do with the business cards you get…

If you are anything like me, when you travel around for meetings and conferences you end up collecting a stack of business cards and they never end up in my contacts.  You could go out and buy a CardScan scanner and scan them all in when you get back to your office, but in all reality who has the time.  Worry not, there is a solution out there for all of you with smartphones.  Welcome WorldCard Mobile.  I first came across Worldcard on my Windows Mobile phone a few years back and when I first switched to an iPhone I was disappointed it did not exist.  Lucky for you, times have changed and the development team has built iPhone and Android apps along with the Windows Mobile app.

The death of an operating system..Say goodbye to Windows..

I have been working in IT for almost 15 years and throughout the time, Microsoft has helped me grow a career but over the last few years we have seen possibly the most significant transition since the advent of the personal computer. What should not be surprising is that Apple has been the catalyst for change. Many people in Generation X and Y and every other name you would like to give those born after 1970, first learned how to use a computer in school, working on early Apple and Macintosh systems. This led this same kids to expect the ability to so word processing without a typewriter, followed by sending messages to each other without paying for a stamp, and now the earliest advocates of computers along with the youngest generations entering the workforce have demanded another change. No longer will these users accept whatever computer and system is thrown in front of them.

I place the blame on Apple with the release of the iphone and the App Store. The idea of presenting a single application to a group of users is not something new,in all reality Citrix has been presenting applications to business users since the days of Metaframe and the original Web Interface, but the ability for Apple to change a global mindset is something Citrix has never been able todo. Users now expect that you can access a single application regardless of what device I am using. Google continued to reinforce the attitude with the release of Android. Android is the largest deployed mobile platform in the world, and along with it comes multiple app stores.

The next question is how would applications being presented to a phone or tablet kill an operating system. The answer is rather easy on this one. Users want to bring a Macbook or a ipad or a Android tablet and get all the same applications that you used to only be able to get with Windows. VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft will all present a full windows desktop to a user, but why would I want a full desktop when all I need is an email client and a word processor or an internet browser. The added overhead on a device that I bought because it was optimized seems pointless. The same generations that grew up on Apple II Plus computers and a green screen now have 10x the power in their pocket with smartphones and even more with the ipad and newer tablets. Microsoft has even realized that application based computing is the wave of the future, with the release of Office Live, Microsoft is allowing users to get to their largest consumer product through the web without ever installing a product. When you combine that with the likes o Dropbox and SugarSync you can have all your data and all your applications sitting in a datacenter that you could care less where it is as long as you can access it from your optimized device. A device that is optimized to just run what others create and give you the best connection possible to the internet and the plethora of cloud products.

Windows may not die in the next year or two but with the speed of computing today it is very possible that the life of what has at this point been the most common base for personal computing is very short. Over the next week Citrix will make multiple releases allowing the user to get closer to the application centric computing model during their major conference, you can expect the same style releases from VMware in the end of August at their conference. Microsoft itself has been focusing on the other product lines with added push to use Unified Communications and Collaboration tools along with their own virtualization products. Windows has been around longer than many people imagined and has ridden the wave but it may have been its own biggest enemy by not staying with the times and just becoming a delivery system like iOS.

It has finally come time to close the Windows.

Sent from my iPad 🙂