Volume 27 • No 02 • 2004
ISSN 0742-468X • Since 1978
On-line Since 2000
Bill Gates on the Future of IT
When it comes to speculating about IT, I suppose there are a number of good sources. Peter Batty of Ten Sails (http://www.tensails.com/) recently told an overflowing audience at GITA where he thought GIS was heading. On occasion, I have stuck my neck out as well. But when it comes to understand the underlying forces that will drive GIS I look at the overall IT industry. It wasn’t always true that IT drove GIS. But since the nineties, when GIS found the Wintel platform, we have tracked pretty well with IT trends. Don’t think so? I guess you missed the part about GIS on the Web, or wireless GIS, or the efforts being made by Oracle.
Now as good as Peter Batty and I may be (and I unjustly honor myself by putting me in Batty’s league), the future of IT in the near future is driven, not by Intel, not by the user, not by some software engineer at MIT. No, it is driven by Microsoft. So, to find out where IT is heading, why not just Bill Gates?
In the year Two Thousand Fourteen
Not long ago, Bill Gates attended Gartner’s Symposium/ITxpo 2004 in San Diego, CA. A reporter asked him to give his vision of computing in the year 2014. The man you love to hate and hate to love cited something he called the “magic of software.” He then said that Moore’s Law would continue to bring about new technology advances.
According to Intel “Gordon Moore [co–founder of Intel] made his famous observation in 1965, just four years after the first planar integrated circuit was discovered. The press called it “Moore’s Law” and the name has stuck. In his original paper, Moore observed an exponential growth in the number of transistors per integrated circuit and predicted that this trend would continue. Through Intel’s relentless technology advances, Moore’s Law, the doubling of transistors every couple of years, has been maintained, and still holds true today. Intel expects that it will continue at least through the end of this decade. The mission of Intel’s technology development team is to continue to break down barriers to Moore’s Law.“In chart form, it looks like this:
Back to Gates
Gates told reporters that within a decade, hardware could be considered as almost free, with powerful server and desktop systems, high bandwidth networks and wireless technology bringing anytime, anywhere connections. Got that? Hardware could be considered almost free!
But when it comes to free software, Gates has a different opinion. He said, “Free software can do some good stuff, but not the really good stuff.” He also said that the open source community would have to deal with compatibility problems, once it gets an installed base.
Now there is some truth to what he says, but don’t think he isn’t worried – he is. A growing number of students are growing that expect everything from music to software to be free. Keep in mind that in general these students have never really had to produce anything to get money (Dear Dad, everything is fine, need money. Love, your Son). Obviously, everything cannot be free, because someone has to pay the bills.
But free drives down costs, nonetheless. There are free open source versions of Office – StarOffice for example, but it is not nearly as good as the Microsoft version. It is good enough, however, to force the kids at MS to make improvements and offer a steep academic discount to students, past students, future students and those who might have met a student.
Slowly but surely, open source applications are taking hold in corporate America. The applications may not be totally free, but they are cheaper than the commercial versions. Corporations want someone to go to, so they would rather pay a few dollars to Red Hat or Mandrake for a supported version of Linux, but the savings over Windows server are significant.
Want more proof? – Go to the web. You’ll see Linux operating systems with Apache web servers letting a PHP script drive a MySQL database application. Naturally, you’ll watch all this unfold on your free web browser.
Gates, however, does have a valid point when it comes to scale. Many open source programs work because the installed base is small. But when you look at Linux versus Microsoft’s server operating system, the open source code is gaining an installed base and already has to deal with the compatibility issues today. Gates is right that Linux could suffer from incompatible distributions as vendors mix and match components and system tweaks.
Free Hardware, Costly Software?
At the core of Gates’ comments was the notion that hardware could be almost free in 10 years, but free (open sourced) software won’t be good for the best kind of applications during that timeframe.
I think that means that Gates doesn’t make much hardware, so if it is free, it will not hurt his margins. Moreover, the cheaper the hardware, the larger the market for his wares. Microsoft is a software company, though. At what Gates is saying is that they will vigorously defend the business. This means you and I should be getting better products at a better price over the next few years.
And for GIS…
So what does all this mean for GIS? Lower cost hardware is always good. Keep telling your gaming friends that you think the graphics need improvement on their favorite first person shooter. Let those graphics cards get more powerful and cheaper, and we in the GIS world will benefit. As hardware drops more users can upgrade or join in for the first time.
But what about open source software. You can just bet that at universities across the world students are creating GIS apps that will be available free or as donation-ware. The only difference is that because the students of today can take advantage of years of GIS development and the integration of GIS with other applications, the new crop will be worth looking at. Who knows? Maybe Oracle and Sun will team up and give us StarGIS or LinGIS.
There is always the possibility that Jack Dangermond may retire some day and just put all that Arc stuff in the public domain. Now that’s something worth thinking about.
Back to the free hardware issue …
One last thought on Gates’ prediction of free hardware. Has he priced an X-box lately?
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