Ruminations in a fog

I write this in a timeshifted fog with most of my thoughts for this blog coming during the hour of the wolf. I’ve thought about changing my writing for the blog to the perspective of an alter ego such as Hari Seldon, John Galt (who is he anyway?), or Kilgore Trout, but I guess I’ll set Fred free and let him write as himself. So it goes.

It was interesting to me that this trip, my phone and blackberry just worked – whether in England or Holland. I didn’t have to select networks or anything – they just worked on demand. I’ve had an interesting evolution with the hotel I stay in Amsterdam. My first trip staying there 4 years ago, I had a dial-up connection that ended up costing me over $100 in one night! That evolved to high-speed wire fee-based ethernet, then this trip, it was free wireless. Access is turning into a commodity – I just expect it to be there and to work. You can see this evolution reflected in our connection to eachother. While I was at Gatwick waiting for my flight to Amsterdam, I was exchanging e-mails with Ariel Gordon, one of our CTOs, about virtualization. Ariel is based in Houston, but our e-mail exchange was at 3:30 am Central time. Ended up that he was in Israel, but it wouldn’t have been out of the question if he had been in Houston. I later called a guy about fixing my sailboat and, as far as he was concerned I was in Austin. This whole high-speed communication thing has changed the concept of locale. Even though I’m in Europe, I log in to Austin/Houston machines, my home page displays local weather and news, my IM and Skype show people I want to connect with and their availability. So I have a “home” connection. On the other hand, I got a call from my credit card company trying to sell me more services. The call was from a guy in India. While his “locale” is India, he’s adjusted his timeschedule to match the locale of the geography he serves. When I worked with GE, I did the same thing. HQ was in New York, but I was based in Seattle, so I came in at 7:00 am or earlier, so I could maximize overlap with the folks in NY. Maybe the earth is flat?

What does this have to do with utility computing? Well, it appears to me that now I require all my services to be available all the time, anywhere. Multiply me by millions. This means that BMC Austin/Houston can’t take an internal system down during “off hours” to run maintenance. It means that utilization rates on computing systems of global oriented companies will go up because they will be used 24 hours a day (internally and externally). In fact, I wonder why, for example, stock trading is limited to “working hours” of the locale of the trading exchange. It seems like, at some point, we’ll have a major stock exchange go 24 hours a day at some point. Think of the implications for traders, they’ll need to have people available 24 hours to make sure there’s someone to sell at the point a major event (or disaster) occurs. So now resource scheduling, maintenance, and availability needs to be managed from a completely different perspective. I don’t think anyone has fully thought this thru…

If you’ve read this far, here’s the real interesting fog induced rumination. In fact, if no one is has mentioned this before I claim it for BMC… I pay all my bills online, but to-date, most of my bills are still provided only via paper. I can access most accounts on the internet and get my billing info, but it’s a pain to have to go to several different websites, log-in, and retrieve my billing info. Private RSS. Of course secure, but also private. Why can’t I subscribe via RSS to my billing statements, then use Bloglines, for example, to create one summary page that displays my bills as they change/update on each host/private page? This would simplify my billing enormously. Another use case, more in the BMC line, is support. Why not have customers subscribe via RSS to product support? Then as products notices come out, they have one page to look at. In fact, the page will automagically update. This can also be used to limit spam effects. Then any support e-mail would not have to reference a web page, the customer would just be reminded to look at their self made RSS update page. I think this would be a real interesting extension for RSS – but it has to be private and secure. Maybe it’s already done, but…

Lot’s of stuff.