Todd Kwon-Do

Just in the nick....

I got into technology just in time. When I was first getting interested in technology, the Internet wasn’t anything more than a few bulletin boards that were connected together by modems. IBM had just launched their “Personal Computer” line, the really big hard drives were 10mb (we all thought we would never fill them), and the modem hanging off the back of my Commodore 64 computer was 300 baud (about 50,000x slower than my current connection – literally). In those days, DOS was still king and Microsoft had just launched Windows 2.1.

Since then, the pace of change has been staggering. I remember excitedly telling my parents that I could send an “electronic mail message” from our home in VT to a friend in CA just as fast as the U.S. Post Office could. It took about five days from the time I sent the message for it to get where it was going. Its travel plan involved all of the various computers it touched to dial each other nightly and transmit their batch of messages to their closest neighbor. Eventually, the message would get where it was going.

Today, we don’t measure the delivery time of email in days, hours, minutes, or even seconds; we measure it in milliseconds. In fact, as IT guys, we get irritated if we can’t send data around the entire planet in less than 150ms.

Yeah, I got into it in time to see the technology equivalent of the Renaissance. I have seen dialup give way to ISDN, which lost to DSL, which was later replaced by T1’s, which are now slow compared to Fiber Optic Cable connections. I have seen Palm Pilots lose to tablets which were defeated by Treos which are on their way out in favor of newer Blackberrys and iPhones. Everyone today has email, and most have some sort of personal networking page like Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn. We have been through countless iterations of Windows and mountains of software to make our lives “easier”.

It has all happened so fast. The funny thing is that most of us have now become acclimated to the pace of change. We are at a point where the wonder of innovation is lost to the expectation of development. A little more than a year ago, Mercedes unveiled a car that could parallel park itself! It’s a car… that drives itself! As a community we should have been falling out of our chairs at an idea like that. Conversely it was taken in stride as a normal occurrence, just like the first commercial space flight and the ability to get absolutely anything on the planet delivered to our door by Amazon.com.

And why should we get excited? We expect nothing less. For example, many of us receive personalized driving directions from a device the size of a pack of cards that gets information beamed to it from billion dollar satellites in outer space. What do we use this unbelievable power for? Obviously, we use it to find the nearest Starbucks!

I guess my point is that it’s a good idea, now and then, to stop and consider where we are, where we have come from, and where we might be going. I did this a week ago in Las Vegas at a conference about virtualization technology. At the conference I saw some of the most amazing tools for businesses. I spent a couple of days walking the show floor, and every vendor there was sporting some new and unbelievable innovation. After three days it was obvious to me that the Renaissance is nowhere near to being over.

As I sat on the plane on the way home, I watched the people around me type on their laptops, play games on their cell phones, and watch their portable DVD players. I wondered how long it would be before the planes are all Internet ready and we can continue to work or stay connected with loved ones while we travel. I also wondered what the personal electronics will look like just 10 years from now.

In the end, there is an awful lot to keep up with. For business owners, it has become that much more important that we surround ourselves with good advisors. The benefit of a good consultancy is the breadth of experience that they bring to the table, and the exposure that they have to new solutions. A good consultancy can clarify options, simplify deployments, and make it dramatically easier to “leverage the best and avoid the rest”.

posted by Todd @ 11:13 AM