When good enough means disruption part 2

Back in April I wrote an article about various potential disruptors built on the advance of cheap CPU, cheap disk space and faster, cheaper wireless mobile or cellular broadband.

The article was based on the theme of feature and performance overshoot by the mainstream vendors. In their pursuit of the highest margin, price-insensitive and therefore most demanding consumers, suppliers of technology overshoot the mainstream requirements.

This allows low end disruptors a foothold in the market, offering significantly lower price products which just fulfill consumer requirements, or more importantly for the disruptor fulfill a new need within the product area which isn't currently serviced by the major players.

A good example of overshoot is the current PC. Most if not all are more than fast enough for all applications apart from computing gaming. The major vendors Intel and AMD (and Sun) have moved from packing more transistors per CPU per nanometer to having more CPUs per chip, Dual Core and Quad Core for Intel and AMD and Niagara for Sun.
Interestingly enough this change in architecture is starting to disrupt the major leaders in multicore CPUs i.e. the graphics card vendors Nvidia and ATI.
Most graphics cards can have up to 128 mini CPU Cores per card. Many people are starting to use their massive parallel computation abilities in areas outside of rendering pictures and video for games and movies. The vendors have released Software Development Kits (SDKs) to help this new usage and spurn additional demand for their hardware.
This is a case where the technology was complex, the language hard to develop code in and now has changed to approaching a standard module/interface, which is making it easier to develop code. So going from closed and integrated to being open and potentially modular.
So how are the CPU players Intel and AMD disrupting the graphic cards. By pursuing open interfaces on the motherboard to talk to their CPUs and by adding graphics cores to their CPU architecture.
It used to be that onboard graphics equaled poor to substandard graphic abilities, hence the requirement for dedicated graphics cards. As time progresses the CPU vendors can add more cores to the CPUs, some which can be dedicated graphic cores.
The other disruptor in this open interface is FPGA (customized CPU cards) which can optimize in hardware what originally was done purely in software on generalized CPUs.

Have Fun

Paul

Oracle integrates towards a new mainframe

With Oracle announcing to acquire Sun (which owns MySQL) their strategy of integrating the enterprise IT stack continues. Now they have two OS products (Oracle Linux) and Sun Solaris. They also now own Java.

I wrote an article in February 2007 that one of the outcomes of Open Source Software (OSS) was the fragmentation of the enterprise IT stack. People could pick and choose the software used. This has lead to increased complexity and Oracle is playing an integrator role now. Basically Oracle can approach businesses and say they can reduce the complexity.

Reading various MySQL blogs and websites, there is a grave concern that Oracle will just let MySQL wither on the vine. I see Oracle using MySQL as a way to allow people to start with MySQL and eventually convert to Oracle Databases as their businesses and database requirements grow. Oracle already owns Innodb, which is the most popular transactional engine for MySQL. Working on making databases customers migration from MySQL to Oracle seamless would be good step for starters.

What does that mean for MySQL?
Given the code is available new databases will appear as forks of that code. Ironically all that will do is increase the amount of complexity in choice for databases.

Good enough means disruption is on the way

I was reading this article from techradar about many different technologies being good enough and in overshooting the requirements for many users (but not the most demanding)
http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/what-if-our-tech-is-good-enough--589169?src=rss&attr=all

From reading the Innovators Dilemma and the following books, this kind of overshooting of requirements means that there is an area of technology ripe for a disruptor.

The article mentions the following technologies

1. Blu-Ray and DVD (Video storage media)
   
2. Windows Vista and Windows 7 (Computer OS)
3. Dual and soon multi-core PCs (Computer hardware)
   
4. Faster broadband internet (Internet, connectivity)

So where is the disrupting technology in each of there areas?

1. Video storage media (and distribution channel) are disrupted by media PCs and massive low cost storage in the form of Hard drives and soonish Solid State Disk (SSD) technology. Plus the distribution channel is hammered by the ease of downloading material off the net.
2. When does having drop shadows and animated stuff on Computer User interface (UI) make much difference. People still struggle with making computers work, most drop into a browser and the browser may be the disrupter here. If you run your computer purely to use tools and software off the internet, why does the underlining OS mean anything.
3. This is similar to point 2. The ability to work almost completely online means that the requirement for performance on the local machine is reduced. This always online is also helped by the disruptor to broadband internet (see point 4). The only holdout in this area is gaming, and the continued ability of game developers to suck every last ounce of performance out of the PC and associated videocards and still leave you with a framerate less than the best.
4. I had read in the past about Japan and South Korea having massively fast broadband and the uptake of this faster broadband was reasonably small compared to the total internet population. The real disruptor here is wireless internet via 3G technology and 802.11 Wireless. Using the internet via your mobile phone sucked until recently and was also really expensive. Now even in Australia, you can get better than 256 KBits (ADSL1) from basically anywhere. In your car, on the train, with the right telco, in places which only to recently had access to either dialup (56 kbits) or satellite (latency is awful).

There is little wonder that the netbooks (smaller laptops) are mentioned. This combines several of the disruptors above. The smaller weight, and less performance means less weight and longer battery life, which dovetails perfectly with the notion of always online applications from anyway.
I have a Dell Mini 9 and it weighs less than some of the books I have. I actually replaced by older laptop for work with this. I can upgrade to 2 Gig and Windows XP works perfectly fine, and the SSD makes IO reads super fast.

The perfect computer device would be a device which has a screen the size of A4, that foldes to A5 (in half), has a touch screen, so you can type on the screen with a full size keyboard and has 3G internet in built, with a battery life around 3-4 hours.

Have Fun