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 THE STAT 26Percentage of wireless customers who use their cell phones to take picturesMore Vitals
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JUNE 1, 2004
Something "Fundamentally Different" Heads Your Way [Page 3 of 4] One big question about that is where they're going to find the spectrum. And it's also not entirely clear that technology will really work that way. But I've also learned not to bet against Intel when they decide to put a lot of money into a project. And that's what they're doing. So WiMAX could be really interesting.In addition to supporting all sorts of different wireless networks and technologies, you're going to have to support all kinds of different wireless devices. In most large enterprises you have varied users, varied needs, varied usage patterns. Delivery of wireless email remains the most important wireless data application. BlackBerry has been a clear leader. Blackberry's is evolving from being a pure hardware company to making its service available on a bunch of different platforms. Palm is also strong in the space with the Trio 600, whose sales have been limited only by the ability to get the devices produced. Microsoft is coming on strong with both Pocket PC and Smart Phone formats. Pocket PC still suffers from not having a keyboard, which in the email world and in many other applications. That's going to change fairly soon. And the final contender--not terribly important so far in the US but very important in the rest of the world, especially Europe--is Symbian. It's a consortium in which the majority stake is now owned by Nokia. And Symbian devices have proven quite popular in Europe. You're going to have to support them all or at least a large subset of them, and this is going to be a challenge. My fifth and last trend is Linux on a desktop. Now, I suspect just about everyone who does IT management has gotten at least some Linux deployed in the server space. Linux's penetration in desktops has so far been very small. There are a number of reasons for this. The main is that Linux desktop user interfaces have not been very polished. That's changing in a fairly significant way, mainly because of the increasing involvement of some very major players in the Linux desktop space. We have Sun with their Java Desktop System; Novell, which bought Ximian, and they have the Ximian desktop. There's Xandros. There's a bunch of other providers. Another major force that's going to drive much better Linux on the desktop is IBM's Linux desktop initiative. A few months ago, Sam Pamisano wrote a memo to all IBM managers setting a goal of getting Linux on half of their internal desktops by the end of next year. That's a lot of desktops. And it's a lot of industry leadership.If IBM can actually make it work, it's going to create a much, much larger market for Linux on the enterprise desktop. Because if IBM can do it internally, IBM Global Services GS can deploy it externally and it's going to be a big deal. The big remaining problem with Linux on the desktop is the application space. Application development has lagged way, way, way behind operating system development. At the moment the only places you could deploy Linux on a desktop is in very controlled environment where you don't need many apps. Obviously you're fine on browsers. You're fine on email clients. Ximian even has a pretty decent Exchange client for their desktop. For productivity apps, there's Star Office from Sun or it's open source version, Open Office. Whether they can really be deployed as an alternative to Microsoft Office depends on the type of user and the demands. In some circumstances, they can. The problem, of course, is most companies have a huge number of custom apps, and most of those custom apps have been written for Windows. And everyone has to think very hard about whether it is worth the cost and trouble of porting those to Linux. It's an economic calculation every company has to make it for itself.So those I think are the five really big issues facing IT managers in the near- to medium-term future. Of course there are little things like budgets and funding and stuff like that. But I don't really know anything about that so I wasn't going to get into it. And I think we have some time left. So I'll be happy to take some questions. Q: Which programming languages that you feel will be dominant in the next few years? Stephen H. Wildstrom: I think that the big two will continue to be C++ and Java. C-sharp is obviously getting some traction and will get more as Dot Net matures and deploys more. But I think it will be primarily remain a C++ and Java world.
BW MALL
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