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More than Moore: How Hardware Has
Opened the Door to a New Era in Personal Content |
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28 June 2004 |
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Today's PC is a pretty darn reliable appliance with tons of
processing power and oodles of storage that's being eaten
up by only the most aggressive gamers and downloaders. For
everyone else the PC is beginning to resemble a marvelously
oversized parking lot, waiting for content to show up
that's just not being produced in enough quantity for
personal use by enterprises and publishers. That's likely
to change as tools and marketing methods begin to fill the
void left by comparatively sparing office automation and
enterprise software. Will content producers take advantage
of the increasing power of personal computing or continue
to live in a server-centric world? There are fears that go
along with the opportunities, but one thing's for sure -
the hardware's not going away. |
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I've owned
my new PC for about four months, now, and have wondered for a
while how much storage I have left on its 60 gigabyte drive
after my usual aggressive use. With a few clicks it was easy
enough to see that I have a mere 44GB of storage left to play
with. 44 gigabytes. I am not good at those analogies of laying
pages end to end to the moon and all that, but any way you
measure it that's a lot of storage - for peanuts. Moreover,
it's storage attached to a pretty rock-solid appliance that
rarely lets me down - not with the reliability of a television
set or radio yet, but getting there. And thanks to the
exponential persistence of
Moore's Law, it's run by a powerful microprocessor that
manages to make the piggish ways of most software seem to be a
rather minor annoyance at worst.
And what's all of this power and storage
meant for? Why content, of course. The advent of multimedia
distribution via broadband Web connections and the deep content
in contemporary gaming packages has made hardware that can keep
up with its volume and speed requirements a necessity, far
eclipsing the requirements of office automation packages such
as Microsoft's Office suite and most enterprise software and
portal systems. Today's desktops have more storage and power
than the typical departmental server of just five or six years
ago. The kids have figured out how to eat up this space and
power pretty easily but for the most part the realm of
professionals has been pretty clueless about how to exploit the
rise of these capabilities. In the midst of institutions
sorting out email, instant messaging and Web portals the most
widely installed investment in content-enabling infrastructure
- personal computing power - now goes largely untapped in most
enterprises.
Exploiting this capability seems to be
largely beyond the interest of most content publishers and only
of tangential interest to most I.T. managers who are just as
glad to have these pesky devices under some semblance of
control. Yet the balance of power for publishing and consuming
content remains largely in the hands of individuals now, and
will remain so for some time to come. What are some of the key
factors that publishers and content enablers need to consider
in the era of high-power enterprise content storage and
publishing devices? Here are a few items to consider:
- Owning content on PCs is now a desirable norm.
While the emphasis on broadband from a publisher's
perspective has been on enabling streaming media and access
to large databases, the kids have yet again led the way by
showing us with their file sharing habits that owning
electronic content on a PC can be convenient and fun. This
convergence of PCs and popular entertainment has most
publishers on the defensive still, as evidenced by
last week's U.S. Senate bill introduction that would ban
file sharing software. Companies can bend the ears of
legislators all they want but the fundamental fact is that
individuals now have machines that are very functional and
effective content servers for personal and communal use. Any
publishing company that does not have a viable strategy for
managing the personal ownership and sharing of their
electronic content on PCs, in whole or in part, is missing
out on the most likely medium in which personal content is
going to be used and stored for quite some time to come. The
Web will always be there but will increasingly become more of
a server farm for personal content consumption.
- Personally published and purchased content will
continue to form the focus of most personal content
consumption. While the deep Web - the content that's not
available on the fraction of Web sites scanned by public
search engines - is an important content source, the truly
deep Web consists of the billions of PCs and personal devices
storing both personal content published by individuals and
content stored by individuals that they have purchased or
downloaded. This is the fundamental conceptual advantage of
file sharing systems: they're the only simple way to date for
the "edges" of a Web to "opt in" to a communal network of
content for exploration and use. When PCs were fairly wimpy
this whole "edges" argument was avoidable by most
institutions, but with the more or less permanent presence of
gigabytes of storage at the fingertips of each user it's a
major factor. Traditional publishers are largely shut out of
this personal environment by design or choice, but
enterprises at least have an indirect finger on it via
corporate and regulatory compliance requirements. Personal
content is where the dialog is, and value follows the dialog.
- Personal Knowledge Management is
now practical for the masses. With the glut of
storage and horsepower at one's fingertips, the content on
one's PC is no longer an afterthought but instead the true
jumping-off point for most content search and usage. Much
talk centers on "Googling" the Web, but in truth most
searches for answers start in one's inbox or file folders -
hence Google's efforts to extend their services to the
desktop. Personal knowledge management - the art and science
of assembling answers and insights starting with one's own
personal content resources and insights and working out to
communal resources - is an arena that is hardly touched at
this point, still largely the province of high-end tools and
only recently coming more into focus for typical users with
the likes of recent tools from players like
ISYS,
MineTech
and others that are able to provide individuals with the
ability to easily use and organize their personal content as
an effective content repository. Add these kinds of
capabilities to an opt-in "Knowledge Network" of peers and
then link it with enterprise and general Web functions and
a "personal first" approach to knowledge management begins
to takes on a powerful form.
The hundreds of millions of PCs are no
more likely to eliminate server-oriented content than a tree is
able to give up its roots, but there's a new dynamic in place
that can no longer be ignored by either the content industry or
the institutions that employ these devices. Personal content is
the new frontier for all content producers and facilitators,
one that will power the industry to new heights of productivity
and profit - if they're willing to facilitate the use of
radically underused enterprise hardware.
-
John Blossom
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