IBM, Microsoft & Google Eras of Computing

This is a must read blog entry from Zoho for all my students. I find it to be a nice summary of how the major compting stages have evolved with each stage more open than the previous. (also be sure to read the blogs by Nicholas Carr and Dan Farber)

"By now it is conventional wisdom to say that there was an IBM Era of computing, then a Microsoft Era, and now we are in the Google Era. In this post, I will explain why Microsoft was not the “next IBM” and why Google is not the “next Microsoft” - there are significant qualitative differences among them, quite apart from their status as the dominant, era-defining players. Understanding that qualitative difference is crucial for third party vendors like Zoho to thrive. I was reminded of this because of the IBM/Google partnership unveiled today (via Dan Farber & see also Nick Carr). As an aside, I have coined a kind of Moore’s Law on these computing eras:

The dominant technology company in a generation reaches its pinnacle at about half the size of the dominant company in the previous generation, and it retains its dominance for half as long.

The original IBM mainframe era (in contrast to today’s IBM) was one of highly closed systems. IBM was not just the dominant player of the era, IBM was pretty much the entire ecosystem. There just wasn’t a lot of room for third parties to play in. Third parties were marginalized companies surviving on IBM’s sufferance or professional services companies (like EDS) or were providers of cheap replacement parts, which felt vaguely dirty, borderline legal (consider today’s third party print cartridge situation as an analogy).

In contrast to IBM, Microsoft was far more open, which indeed was the original reason for their success. Microsoft unleashed what I would call the semi-open era of computing. The acronym ISV (independent software vendor) came into its own during the Microsoft era. Indeed, Microsoft encouraged ISVs, provided fairly good support - up to a point. The defining test for Microsoft was Netscape, the most prominent ISV that got on the wrong side of Microsoft. Microsoft failed the test by winning; their victory over Netscape forever established their reputation in the industry, a reputation that finds its echo in Yahoo’s cultural resistance to being assimilated. Indeed Nick Carr alludes to that defining Netscape moment in his title “Is Office the New Netscape?”

Now the present Google era. Google has the genetic and cultural advantage of being born in an open source world, with a business model that is aligned with rather than antagonistic to open source. It reflects in how they conduct their ecosystem initiatives. Google Gears comes with one of the most liberal open source licenses (BSD license), and we at Zoho particularly appreciate the support provided Google’s open source teams. In our extensive interaction with them, we could tell how they truly get the value of openness. That openness is going to be the underpinning of the Google era of computing - I hope they never forget that!

OK, that brings me to our own position as an independent vendor. At Zoho, we fully embrace the fact that we play in a Google world. We also fully recognize that opportunities for independent ecosystem players expanded massively during the Microsoft semi-open era compared to what existed in the IBM era, and they will expand even more significantly in the Google open era. Our goal at Zoho is to be an innovative, vibrant, profitable player in this new era. As much as Microsoft utterly dominated computing, vendors such as Adobe and Intuit built thriving businesses (still thriving!). Even more opportunities of that kind exist for independent ecosystem players in the Google era."

I'm going to start this blog with a research topic that has always been of interest to me. Research leading to computers better able to parse languages has great potential for advancing the human-computer interaction.

This recent video from Google is a good place to start.

Google Tech Talks
April, 17 2008

ABSTRACT

Modeling human sentence-processing can help us both better understand how the brain processes language, and also help improve user interfaces. For example, our systems could compare different (computer-generated) sentences and produce ones that are easiest to understand.

I will talk about my work on evaluating theories about syntactic processing difficulty on a large eye-tracking corpus, and present a model of sentence processing which uses an incremental, fully connected parsing strategy.

Speaker: Vera Demberg
Vera Demberg is a Ph.D. student in Computational Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Her research focus is on building computational models of human sentence processing.

Vera obtained a Diplom (MSc) in Computational Linguistics from Stuttgart University, and a MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. She has published papers in a number of top venues for language processing and psycholinguistic research, including ACL, EACL, CogSci and Cognition.

For her PhD research, she's been awarded the AMLaP Young Scientist Award for best platform presentation by a junior scientist. She was a finalist for the Google Europe Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship in 2007.