Originally written on Monday, 22. September 2008.

Gordon E Moore, co founder of Intel, observed a trend that was as true in 1965 as it is today : the processing power available to users would double every two years. This has become known as Moores Law.

Broadly speaking, this trend has been proven correct for pretty much every and any two year cycle since the late 1960’s and, unless something catastrophic happens, the future looks to continue this same trend.

For consumers, users, generally, this has provided a wealth of opportunities and headaches alike. There is more data created and saved and passed around than ever before. There are more methods of saving that data and more and more methods of distributing that data to the point where the average home computer has 96 million times more storage and processing power than just 20/25 years ago.

You, like me, may have started out on computers like the Commodore C64. the 48k Spectrum, the Vic 20 or like me, the 16k Acorn Electron. Heady days indeed. Look at your current typical home computer, with its 3Ghz processor, 1Gb plus of RAM and 160gb plus hard drive, not to mention the terrabyte plus external hard drives, capable of passing so much information so quickly that two ‘firewire’ connections are now de rigueur.

There is a feeling of course that this wealth of incredible processing power does nothing more than allow the user to get to the wrong answer more quickly than ever before.

The urban and industry myth surrounding Thomas Watson, IBM Chairman in the mid 1940’s suggests he said that there would be a need for no more than five computers on the entire planet. Five. He may have said this, he may not, and short of employing the finest of mediums with the blackest of cats, we may never know. However, it is the idea that is interesting, not necessarily its provenance.

The situation now is that almost every home in the developed western world has dozens of computers; from the microwave and VCR, oven and web enabled refrigerator, the plethora of chips in the average family car, controlling everything from the angle of the lights to the warmth of your bum, the house alarm, television, calculators, self moving vacuum cleaners, digital cameras that are about as close to the Box Brownies and Camera Obscura as I am as likely to want to meet Anthony Worrell-Thompson, i.e., not very; and of course the ever more complicated and complex mobile ‘phone.

This is all a world away from the visions of Babbage and his ‘automatic counting machine’, or even Alan Turing, to whom an homage is made on the front of the majority of music players and an ever increasing number of lap top computers.

It is, broadly speaking accurate, that the average ‘smart ‘phone’ on the market today has more processing power than some of the earlier Apollo missions launched during the 1960’s, not only in raw processing power but also sheer storage. I have a 2GB card plugged into my micro SD slot and is happily playing my music as I type these words. This is my mobile ‘phone.

And herein lies the crux of some of the most important issues and questions the technology and communications industries are facing right now. Technology convergence and differentiation. The boundaries between a device for talking and a device for reading email, playing music, looking at the internet, getting lost and getting found once more are becoming less and less clear. A single device, with differing levels of success, is replacing more and more smaller, more specialist devices.

Why carry a mobile phone and music player when the average mobile phone is a music player ? Why is a computer needed when it is perfectly possible to download content directly to storage in your mobile ‘phone, to view your friends latest holiday pictures and of course to share the same with anyone else who is even vaguely interested ? Why indeed ?

Cloud Computing is advocating more and more then need for connectivity and ‘single device’ convergence, the ‘one box does all’ solution where everything is accessed to and from The Cloud. The Cloud, as advocated by the likes of Ellison and Jobs, Gates and Page and Brin suggests that mobile connectivity is the future. One small box neatly located in your pocket will bring to you all the wonders of the digital world, all kept secure safe from prying eyes where ever the user happens to be, as long as of course the user is connected to the internet via a wireless connection which will carry this vast amount of data.

So far, Mobile Network Operators have been reluctant themselves to make the investment that is needed to enable this wireless utopia envisaged by the California Visionary Society. They have, after all, had their fingers bitten, more than once, and fairly recently.

3G was seen by many as the next logical step in providing high speed wireless connectivity. Many MNO’s made large investments in 3G, both in the purchasing of licences from their respective regulators, the UK for example gave the treasury £22 milliard pound [£22 billion for those versed only in American] plus a large undisclosed amount to technology supplies to actually build the networks themselves. So far, there are three old men in Weston Supermere, a fourteen year old boy in Lewisham and a chocolate machine in Hounslow which are considered active users. Returns have not yet been anywhere near enough to cover the investments and, it is likely, probably never will.

SO what of Mobile TV ? Will this not be the catalyst to a bright and rosy future of instant gratification? Surely users will be flocking to buy new devices and new services to watch the latest episode of ‘Celebrity insert name of vacuous programme here’ or learn how Jade Goody is currently supplementing her protein intake. Alas, no.

Consumers seem to be asking themselves two or three pretty basic questions when it comes to mobile television. The first is ‘given that I have a television the size of a window at home which is piped with more channels than I could ever possibly watch for a not inconsiderable fee, why then would I pay more money to watch less channels on a two by one inch screen’ and secondly, ‘why not just buy a Casio portable telly, bigger screen and much, much cheaper’. This is in fact what a lot of people actually do.

Even in Korea, the southern part anyway, long seen as a test bed for emerging technologies and seen as the haven of mobile television, even here, subscriber numbers are dropping off and revenues are decreasing. It seems that, once more, suppliers and networks have misjudged the paying public’s ability to have money weaned out of the wallets and into the coffers of Big Business.

It seems at the moment that the only thing that is really capturing the imagination of the user is the device, the thing that sits in their hand. The own it they feel, they can do with as they wish, it is theirs. They are in the technology world and they can feel it sitting there. And they can show their friends and bored and largely unimpressed passers by that they have grasped the proverbial bull by the large and pointy horns and will ride the Pamplona Run of Technology to the end. Or at least until they have read the 274 page manual, and forgotten all but ‘press the green button’.

The end user device is becoming more and more the public focus of the driver for the technology. Small, shiny boxes, with buttons, without, with large screens, with small, with eye candy, without, qwerty keyboard, or traditional numericals, this is the current battle ground. This is where the current marketing budgets are being focused and where the black polo necks are turning and looking. There is a small but significant amount of success here, at least in shifting boxes, but the networks themselves, the service enablers are not yet seeing the returns, they are not seeing the users using and, more importantly paying for extra services.

There may be a million pictures taken by thousands of mobile devices, and yet the amount of MMS traffic is, frankly, comical. Good old SMS, the tool that allows every of spotty teenager to use and abuse our glorious language, is still the back bone of Operators margins., Hardly surprising given the retail price and the cost of the SS7 link in the first place.

So, once the user has exhausted the eye candy of the device what happens next? Largely, nothing, because the networks have not fully invested in those wonderful 21st century networks, that will give unfettered access to The Cloud, in cheap, usable chunks. Which means of course the demand is small, so there is no investment, which keeps the demand low, and so, like a mitochondrial protein, this cycle is seemingly never ending.

So what happens ? This is a good question. There will, almost inevitably, be one or two companies that do make the investment to provide the sort of connectivity only thought possible in episodes of The Jetsons. But, like the early days of the railways in England and across europe, it is the pioneers who do the hard work, who have the vision, the foresight and the guts and promptly go bust and the cautious, wait and see types, how pick up the pieces, and the margins, and make the large juicy profits.

We are yet to see the start of this cycle, so it will be some time before we, as users, are granted the gift of The Cloud and the unfettered joy that streaming adverts will, undoubtedly, bring.

And what of Walton and his vision of only five computers ? He may have been correct in some ways. Lift the concept of ‘computer’ up from the desk top and place it higher. Elevate it to The Cloud. Consider each interconnect in the cloud as a computer, each content provider as a computer and maybe Walton will be more correct that ever he thought.

Tim Berners-Lee, when he first touted the idea of the internet when he was working in CERN, saw the opposite. He saw content and access be controlled by the people who owned the content, the user. Big Business, if it is to provide The Cloud at levels that we, the users, are prepared to pay, will have different ideas.