Dubai: It’s April 7, 1964, and while the Beatles are telling the world that money Can’t Buy Me Love, IBM is attempting to convince the business community that it can at least buy you a decent mainframe.
The IBM System/360 — touted as the Big Blue’s most innovative iteration to date — had just been launched. The original announcement stated that, “System/360 represents a sharp departure from the computer design and manufacturing concepts of the past. It is the product of an international effort that involved IBM laboratories and plants across the world, and is the first time IBM has redesigned the basic internal architecture of its computers in a decade.”
Since then, the technology industry has changed in extraordinary ways, and the music industry has made a habit of mirroring these incredible developments with some groundbreaking (and often dubious) shifts of its own.
For the next 17 years, the world of technology would be living its first platform. In this world, mainframes reigned supreme, and just a few million enterprise users on the planet had access to them via terminals. Music, meanwhile, had its own heavy-hitting giants in the form of Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and The Rolling Stones. Throughout this era and way into the subsequent one, all computer-related activity was restricted to the interaction between a person and a computer. However, such interaction was never of a personal nature.
This would only change after the end of the first platform, although the event that made this transformation possible actually happened during that era; in 1973, to be precise — the year when Donny Osmond broke a million hearts with Young Love and Slade broke the Yuletide mould with Merry Xmas Everybody. Oh, and the year Bob Metcalfe broke new tech ground by inventing Ethernet at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre.
Fast forward to 1981 and while the music world was getting its very first taste of a new sound called hip hop, the tech world was taking its first tentative steps onto the second platform. This was the age of the server-client model and the PC — the device that, together with the Ethernet and the local and wide area networks it made possible, brought about the personalisation of IT. And when PCs started becoming more interconnected around 1983, we quickly moved into a world where one of the most incredible creations ever imagined — email, not Kajagoogoo’s Too Shy — started being used to share company information online from different places on Earth.
From this point, we move 10 years into the future. Nirvana’s seminal Nevermind album is set to define an entire generation, while CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) is set to redefine the whole world as we know it by creating a global hypertext system and making it available to the public as the World Wide Web. This exacted one of the most amazing leaps in technology: we went beyond sharing company documents with specific people to sharing personal data with complete strangers. Blogging was born, which would soon be followed by a personal data generation and sharing revolution.
During the first platform era, the few technology vendors in existence would offer end-to-end solutions. Throughout most of the 2nd Platform, as technology adoption accelerated and widened its reach, the market created opportunities for more specialised technology providers to emerge. This, for instance, was the case for Intel in the semiconductor industry, Cisco in networking, Oracle in databases, Microsoft in operating systems, EMC in storage, and Yamaha in dodgy synthesised 80s music.
The 26 years of the second platform era were also characterised by an exponential increase in the number of users and applications — users went from millions to hundreds of millions and applications went from thousands to tens of thousands. Still, the computing industry was focused on the enterprise, and personal usage of computers was secondary. Its progress would come as a result of advances in enterprise systems and applications.
And so we arrive at 2007, the year when the iPhone and Google Apps were launched. This was also the year in which Amazon and Salesforce.com started offering their cloud services, and Barbadian starlet Rihanna proposed her own cloud solution by warbling incessantly about umbrella-ella-ellas. It is worth mentioning that, at this time, both Hadoop and Twitter were only around a year old, while a young Justin Bieber was beginning to make a name for himself on a two-year-old platform called YouTube. These were the seeds of what we now recognise as the main trends in technology adoption today: mobility, cloud computing, Big Data analytics, and social media. This was also the start of the third platform.
The aforementioned trends have caused extreme disruption in the IT world and have resulted in innovation now being more focused on individual consumer demands than on global enterprise needs. This is a world in which the internet is increasingly being accessed through mobile devices, and the amount of data generated by both people and machines is growing so fast that the digital universe will likely expand 50 times in size before the end of 2020.
The third platform has seen the number of users explode from tens of millions to billions, and applications escape the corporate world to become a means of entertainment, self expression, and communication. And in the time it has taken the tech world to move from computers the size of a family car to invisible cloud storage, the music world has somehow ‘evolved’ from The Beatles to One Direction. Talk about progress!
The columnist is group vice-president and regional managing director for the Middle East, Africa, and Turkey at global ICT market intelligence and advisory firm International Data Corporation (IDC).
