Critical Thinking: Connecting the dots and the end of the Personal Computer

A big part of critical thinking is just watching the world around you, and then trying to “connect the dots”.   For example:  Why did Hewlett Packard (HP) buy Palm??  Why does a computer/printer company want to expand it's phone business?  Yes, HP was already in the phone business, but hardly anyone new it.

Have you noticed that the price of a PC and the price of a smartphone are at the cross point on a graph?  The low end PCs and the high end smartphones are almost the same price.   

Conclusion:  PCs will soon become as extinct as your land line—for a few reasons.

I stopped using a land line 5 years ago – why pay for an extra phone line when your cell coverage is ubiquitous?  Well, to be honest, I didn’t really totally dump it, I still keep the number on the most basic, cheapest plan, which I think is around $16/month.  The first reason for keeping it, is that my land line number is listed in 411 Directory Assistance. Amazingly, 411 for cell phones (example: www.cellpages.com)  hasn’t really caught on .  Anyone know why??    When you call my land line my answering machine message says: “Call my cell at xxx-xxxx”.  The second anachronistic use for my land line is that it is an integral part of my home alarm system, but that too is becoming web based.  My point is-- we are slowly letting go of the landline, and soon it will go the way of Film, Watches, and CD’s.   What is the next big piece of technology to disappear?   Answer:  your PC, laptop, netbook – they will all be history in a couple of years!

First clue:  Hewlett Packard just bought Palm smartphones.   Apple computer owns the iphone, and Google has the Android.  Second clue:  Cloud computing means you no longer need a hard drive to store your data because your storage is on the web, and storage costs are practically free.   Third clue:  Computers are getting so cheap that they will be giving them away in cereal boxes pretty soon.  The profit margin is going, going, gone.  The PC will die, but the keyboard and monitor will live on!!!

Imagine a world where your only connection to the internet was your cell phone, all of your passwords were stored on your phone, and all of your data was stored for free in the cloud.  It would be a perfect world if the keyboard and the screen on your smartphone were more PC sized--more user friendly.   How about if your smartphone was just your conduit to the internet, but yet it had the ability to wirelessly connect with a dumb keyboard/monitor?  What if you were simply able to place your smartphone next to a dumb keyboard/monitor, the phone and keyboard/monitor connect ( wireless and encrypted ) allowing your internet access on your phone to be conveniently managed with a full size keyboard and monitor?  Once you are done at the keyboard/monitor, you walk away, the connection is terminated, and no data is stored on the keyboard/monitor.  Bye, bye PC!    I think Hewlett Packard got it right.   Keyboard/monitors would be cheap and ubiquitous--they would be free perks, just as wifi is free almost about everywhere.

Where does this leave Microsoft?  Will cloud computing, smartphones, and the death of the PC be the end of Microsoft?    Maybe your smart phone will use your large screen tv as a monitor, with a wireless keyboard.    How about the benefit of just having all of your data in the cloud rather that spread out over multiple computers--work, home, ipad, etc?   How will this paradigm shift affect the way that you do business?

Can WikiLeaks be perfect ? Forever ?

As reported in the New York Times today, The White House was pretty upset with WikiLeaks.com, and it's founder Julian Assange.  Apparently  some 92,000 secret military reports relative to the war in Afghanistan were leaked to WikiLeaks, which in turn released them to The New York Times and two other news organizations, Der Spiegel in Germany and The Guardian in Britain. The documents covered a 6 year period from January 2004 through December 2009. It sounds like everyone involved was trying to do their best to protect the people that might have been exposed by this leak.  

WikiLeaks feels that it is their duty, right, and responsibility to expose governments and business.  From their webpage:  "WikiLeaks is a multi-jurisdictional public service designed to protect whistleblowers, journalists and activists who have sensitive materials to communicate to the public."  I would mostly agree, but with any power, comes a warning of caution.   WikiLeaks proudly states on their webpage:  "Before the Dec 2007 national elections, WikiLeaks exposed $3,000,000,000 of Kenyan corruption and swung the vote by 10%. This lead to enormous changes in the constitution and the establishment of a more open government — one many hundreds of reforms catalyzed by WikiLeaks." 

"Swung the vote by 10%"  That's pretty powerful stuff!   Powerful enough that I would guess that somewhere in the future, someone will try to take advantage of this power to swing a vote, by "leaking" to WikiLeaks a forged document--it only has to be good enough to fool.  How good is WikiLeaks verification system?  Did they verify all 92,000 leaked documents that they just received about Afghanistan?  I don't know.   I can only hope they fully appreciate the potential power they hold.


But if WikiLeaks has the power to swing an election, they will eventually get the attention of some evil-doer who wants to game the system with a fake document.  How long will WikiLeaks be perfect in their scrutiny?  Can they be perfect--forever?    If they can swing an election, could they inadvertently be fooled into releasing documents that ultimately resulted in a war? What if WikiLeaks  is infiltrated, and hires an analyst with an agenda??  Could the senior team at WikiLeaks ever become biased?  Could they release some leaks and bury others?  Who is watching WikiLeaks?  


All tough, and interesting questions.  What do you think?

Does your company need a Chief Complexity Officer?

The world is just getting too complex--we all see it in the workplace and our personal lives--everyday!  We just moved into a new house in February, and the previous owner was kind enough to leave us most of the Owners Manuals for everything related to the house--water heater, snow blower, alarm system, sound system, sprinkler system, etc.  What he didn't leave, we were able to find on the Web.  Being the compulsive, organized person that I am, I created an 8 1/2 x 11 manila folder for each piece of equipment in the house that required some sort of manual.  We are now over 40 folders.  Will I ever read them in their entirety?   NO.  Did I have to read some of them--absolutely--you almost need to be an electrical engineer to operate a home entertainment system nowadays.   Hopefully, I won't need to go deeper into the manuals unless something goes terribly wrong.         C'mon,   40 files to operate a house!

I will spare you the details about my monthly repeating health insurance payment through Quicken, the one that no one seems to be able to stop from repeating--Quicken, the bank, no one.  So, this out of date payment ( my insurance premiums have been raised multiple times since this started ) keeps getting paid every month unless I manually go in to cancel it, only for it to reappear the following month!  It's takes me less time to do a monthly delete of this rogue payment, much less time than it would take me to continue the battle with tech support.

The world is too complex, the world knows it's too complex, and it is totally unable to control itself.  Take for example, the story on NPR this week about the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).    DHS is responsible for providing briefings to 108 committees, subcommittees, and caucuses .

Michael Chertoff was quoted in the NPR story  ""We calculated that in 2007-2008, there were more than 5,000 briefings and 370 hearings," says Chertoff, who was secretary of the department from 2005 to 2009. That consumes an awful lot of time. But truthfully … most people miss the biggest problem. And that is that the direction you get from the committees tends to be inconsistent."

At the time of  9/11 DHS  reported to 86 such committees -- their goal after 9/11 was to reduce that number.  Nine years later the number is UP to 108.

My real concern is that all of this complexity adds to our collective vulnerability.   BP's complex engineering and management resulted in the Deepwater Horizon disaster, communication satellite failures result in millions of Blackberries going down, and our hyper complex financial system resulted in the recent recession.   It took me months to figure out what the whole credit default swap fiasco was all about.

How do we manage complexity before it totally overwhelms us?  Will we reach a tipping point when the benefits of our complex systems are outweighed by the vulnerability that they subject us to?   Will we reach a point when we finally have to actively start simplifying government, technology, finance, and our own lives.  I don't want to start sounding like Ted Kazcynski--but I am concerned.  Will we need Chief Complexity Officers (CCO) in our companies to manager our out-of-control complexity?  I think we will.  The CCO will be the one high level person, whose sole responsibility is to look at the big picture.   Look at the risk to benefit ratio of each new complexity that creeps into our operations.  We can either give complexity free reign, or start managing it.  We better make up our minds -- Soon!

What do you think?????