"There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen." —Vladimir Lenin
This has been such a week or several weeks. Everything
seems to be happening. Most of it not so good. And it
ain't over.
At such times, it is easy to become
despondent. Americans are watching cherished institutions crumble in
the face of leftist ideology: the FBI, the courts, election officials, the
Justice Department, ballots in trucks, ballots in suitcases. No need
to review that here.
Well, there is something else going on, and maybe it's time to dig
into it a bit.
Stand back from the political maelstrom, take a deep breath, and
let's talk technology. No, let's go deeper and talk software.
Marc Andreesen, a leading venture guy, wrote an important piece
years ago: "Why
Software Is Eating the World."
His thesis is that software runs about everything, so software,
the computer instruction set, will run the world. OK, let's leave it
there.
America just lived through the first wave of what might be called
a one-sided software war. Software, as in Google, Facebook, Twitter,
and other "Big Techs," worked together to impact an election
cycle. Nobody disputes that, not even the
techs. Actually, they are pretty proud of it.
Americans, particularly the ones daily censored on Twitter and
Facebook, look at these monoliths and see eternal weaponry arrayed against
them. Their senators and reps will never break them
up. Most take money from Google, and the rest live in fear of
crossing them.
One man's monolith is another man's dinosaur. Don't
fear these guys; they just got there first.
Looking at the technology behind all these firms, one finds they
are using conventional software stacks, the kind pretty much everyone uses
today. They just have scale — they spent billions on hardware,
software, programming. An impossible hurdle to duplicate.
But it's not. Not at all.
We are at the end of a technology cycle that began in the 1960s,
driven by Moore's Law. Hardware got twice as fast and half as
expensive every two years, so software could get fatter and more inefficient
and still work great.
That world has changed. We are about at the end of the
road for engraving chips any smaller, otherwise electrons jump around and screw
up everything. Stuff is not getting faster or cheaper; it is going
the other way. Deeper dive here.
The disruption coming to software is on par with the development
of the cell phone, the graphical user interface, and the personal
computer.
There are software technologies in production now, just entering
the mainstream enabling a major corporate application to be rewritten in a
quarter, run 1,000 to a million times faster, on hardware you can hold in your
hand.
Want an example?
For a test, some friends took the world's largest billing
system. You are probably one of its customers. It is for
cell phone stuff.
Well, right now, it costs a billion dollars a year to
run. It took 20 years to build. It takes 25 days to
process 50 million bills in a data center so large you need a golf cart to
traverse it. It consumes the energy equivalent of 100,000 homes.
Using new software paradigms, they rewrote it in 45
days. It produces bills for 100 million customers in minutes, not
days. The data center: a small group of inexpensive
computers on a dining room table. Cost a billion
dollars? Nope. Ten thousand dollars for the computers,
excluding the dining room table. Energy usage? Less than
charging a Tesla.
OK, so what does this mean?
Where some see Facebook, Google, Amazon as tech giants, others see
their complete dependence on obsolete technology. That means they
will always be the highest-cost producer.
Sure, they will have the same opportunity to adopt some of this
new software technology if they choose. But first mover advantage
does have its downside. They would have to essentially rewrite
everything, and they just cannot get there from here.
You will see new Facebooks and models not yet envisioned because
anyone can now build a community if he has essentially free, or almost free
technology and a user base.
The hurdle of raising tens of millions of dollars for massive data
centers and armies of programmers is over. Any group of competent
developers can now deliver a Facebook-like community, running 100 million users
in months. The hardware would fit on that dining room
table. The cost would be trivial.
If you ever watched the movie Zulu, Michael Caine's
first, you see a handful of British soldiers, at Rorke's Drift, hold off an
army of Zulu warriors with spears and hide shields, for days. The
Brits had modern weaponry.
Well, try the same movie if the Zulus had the same
weaponry. Different result.
So be of good cheer, because the technology world is shifting
under our feet. Massive disruption is happening, and we at the edge
are seeing it. So will you if you look.
"Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see
from the center. Big, undreamed-of things — the people on the edge
see them first." —Kurt Vonnegut
The Zulus are about to get the rifles.
Jay Valentine is president of ContingencySales, bringing
disruptive technology to market without venture capital. Jay's
website is www.JayValentine.com.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/12/how_google_falls.html