A History of Emergent Properties

Steve Duplessie's latest blog points at his ESG paper, Commercial Computing Market Dynamics, a continuation of a cloud discussion that started on Marc Farley’s blog, and it’s well worth a read.

Note the subhead to the paper; Predicting the Future by Observing the Past. That got me thinking, so here’s my response; not a criticism of Steve position specifically, more an attempt to point out that, just perhaps, prediction of the future might be pointless. 

What qualifies me to comment? We're all pioneers here. Some are more aware of the past than others, but no-one has yet sat their Cloud 101 exams, We're all rookies, stumbling our way forwards, and this is me (partly qualified based on my 30 years of past experience), adding to the discussion.

I'll assume you've read Steve's paper, because this blog is a (very) short review of a few of the ideas Steve presents, and some personal observations on them.

Steve identifies three eras; Transactional, Distributed and Internet/Cloud. I’d like to extend out in a separate dimension and identify three different eras;

• emulating and eliminating the manual
• the conceivable, but only achievable by IT
• the inconceivable.

Not as succinct or as snappy, I know.

Much of the business activity that drove the great computing revolution of the 1960s and 70s Steve identifies as; how do we get better at the things we have always done manually? Payroll and numeric clerical tasks were first; the great Lyon's systems of the 1950s paved the way. Growth continued in the 60s, but it was still focused on emulating and eliminating the manual.

An example. Cheque (or check) clearing was a major activity carried out by the banks manually prior to the introduction of machine-readable and clearable cheques. It was said (only half jokingly) that the entire population of Southern California would be required by the 1990s to manually process payments, and the replacement of this most labour-intensive of banking tasks with automation drove costs down and increased profitability.

Steve then identifies the next step; leveraging the technology to do tasks that would have been conceivable, but only achievable by IT.

More to the banks' liking, IT allowed growth beyond what was physically possible. They introduced ATMs (cash machines), electronic funds transfer, credit and debit cards, in a very short space of time. They exploited an emergent property of the systems they first employed to do payroll and to clear cheques; its ability to crunch numbers far beyond what was possible manually.

Storing and processing large quantities of data became the norm, as did generating new and different data. Data created beyond the simple analysis and management reports of the manual IT phase was possible, and became the dominant type in terms of its size and importance to the business.

And now we’re in the era of the inconceivable. Using IT for functions that were undreamt of; virtual reality, CT scans and tomography, modeling stochiastic business and scientific processes...

And so on. You get the drift, I'm sure. The inconceivable is now as much part of our daily lives  as breathing, eating, sleeping; and dreaming of yet more applications of the second industrial revolution that started, quietly doing your payroll, in the 1950s.

But who would have dreamt back then that this is where we would end up?

To cut what could be a long thesis short, Commercial Computing Market Dynamics is an educational, persuasive and thoughtful paper that explains the history well, and points to why the IT model of the last 50 years is getting turned on its head. But I believe that there’s more than the three periods identified (Transactional, Distributed and Internet/Cloud).

They are (to me at least) just convenient labels to mark the passage of time.

There’s another history that isn’t described; and it’s non-linear, near-random, opportunistic and messy. A history of emergent properties. A property that can’t be predicted by looking at the parts alone, that’s greater than the sum. It’s what’s driving this phase of IT development, the inconceivable.

Here’s an example. In Steve’s comment on Marc’s blog, he says; ”So, who cares if Google's service goes down? How much are you paying to use it?”

We’re in an era of free [software/storage/compute/network]. Or free for some and nearly free for the remainder. For the first time in IT, there’s almost no way of describing value in terms of cost, because the denominator is tiny; often zero.

“So who cares if you’re not paying for it?” has only one answer; anyone who uses it, that’s who cares. This stuff has become a right in the individual consumer market, not a contract based on an exchange of consideration. That’s an emergent property that I, for one, would have been hard pressed to identify from the process of "Predicting the Future by Observing the Past". For me it falls, fairly and squarely, into the inconceivable category.

Back on Marc Farley's blog, Steve noted; “We can't even agree on what the cloud means.” Sadly, I’m forced to agree.

.

Comments

[Steve Duplessie]

Very inciteful, and as usual, much smarter than my rant. - Steve

[Alex McDonald]

You underestimate your rants. Without wanting to sound like a founder member of the SD Fan Club, they're more than just good; they're splendid.

[goofy]

by google's e-mail example, then since everyone is using it, and it too big to fail, i guess if/when google as a company fails, the fed's gonna have to bail them out!

great... stop bailing out the banks.... bail out the e-mail/search providers!