September 13, 2007
Peter Coffee Talk Summary
LA ACM Chapter September Meeting,
Was held Thursday September 13, 2007.
Executive Summary
(This is a preliminary summary. A typical more detailed report will follow.)
PETER COFFEE'S ANNUAL FORECAST -- "THE NEW NORMAL"
The annual talk by Peter Coffee about the state of the industry, a combined meeting with the AITP group, started out with the speaker's usual "open forum" format; several interesting questions and topics were discussed. The main thrust of this year's presentation was based on the idea of "where will data and applications be located?" In today's global economy, geopolitics is playing an increasing role and is often more important to decisions in the IT world than the actual technology involved. It's an "all new market." A second question involved the issue of public wireless access, and what safety issues apply -- the answer was that it is up to the user to ensure that she is doing everything possible, including VPN, encrypted email, use of effective spam traps, and looking for the "padlock" icon in browsers. Mr. Coffee mentioned that he feels attempts to make things easy for the user which isolate her from understanding the underlying concepts are "just asking for it"; he recalled a quote from Scott McNealy, who said "You have no privacy *now* -- get over it!"
Just before the dinner break, the speaker mentioned that over time the "sender pays" model of advertising will become the dominant model. He also stated that over 99% of advertising money is wasted.
After dinner, the presentation portion of the talk began with some thoughts about Moore's Law, comparing some actual statistics of improvements in the speed of processors, capability of memory and hard drives, etc. Mr. Coffee predicts the advent of the iPod and iPhone as the Moore's Law applications of the future, and advocates the use of mobile user environments such as the Sun Computer "SunRay" environment to allow users access to their tailored environment anywhere in the world on any computer. The speaker then introduced the idea of "Sofware as a Service" or SaaS to the group, saying that on-demand delivery of business function will triple by 2012. Added to SaaS, the "Service-Oriented Architecture" or SOA will be used to expose new functions on the web. These applications will have emergent uses not predicted by their designers, including use of a service version to sell more traditional "in house" applications. Mr. Coffee advocates the use of centralized database applications which allow the user to store any kind of data. In this model, the system maintainer has no knowledge of content and no responsibility for the data other than security and persistence issues.
Moving back to the geopolitical arena, Mr. Coffee indicated that future IT endeavors will need to thrive in an environment of constant change, and that capital and geography will not protect businesses any longer, since knowledge will be the key commodity. Awareness is needed of international legal issues, and systems will be needed that combine secure storage with role- based access. Multi-language support will be required on all products. An increased awareness of cost and expense discipline will be required, and simplified standardized technology platforms will become the norm.
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