Annual Government Solutions Forum

Speaker:

Marc Andreessen

Conference Notes:

“Mega Trends for Information Technology – An Insider’s Perspective”

During the forum I had the opportunity to attend a Keynote session featuring Marc Andreessen, chairman of Opsware and Co-founder of Netscape Communications. After listening to Marc speak it is difficult to think of mobile phones, Playstations, and my automobile the way I always have.

Marc started by saying that consumers are driving the web and technology. To further his point he touched on the mobile phone industry. There are 500 million mobile phones sold worldwide, therefore far more ring tones are being downloaded than songs. Mobile phones are well on their way to having multi-processors. This will enable a much easier way for people to use their mobile phones for web surfing and checking e-mail. The current processor will be used for the phone and the additional processor will run on Linux and function as a PC.

In addition to multi-processor mobile phones, he discussed the evolution of the camera phone. The most recent camera phones have improved technology for taking quality photos. In the next five years, camera phones will have the technology to replace digital cameras and eventually take the place of camcorders as well. Marc also mentioned that China has a larger number of mobile phone users than the United States. I am trying to picture more people walking around on their cell phones than we already see in the US.

Marc then went on to talk about the video game market. His main focus was the Sony Playstation. He told a story about his alma mater the University of Illinois; the students purchased 600 Playstation systems then removed all of the memory boards from the PS’s and linked them together to form one of the largest super computers in the United States, their system run on Linux.

“The Playstation is a super computer,” says Andreessen. The video game market worldwide is twice the size of Hollywood, with hundreds of millions of units sold each year. These machines are able to be sold at low cost because the manufacturer assumes the average consumer will purchase 6-7 games averaging $50 per game. In addition to the PS and PS2, which can be used as a DVD player, Sony is introducing a new game system that will soon replace TiVo called PSX containing a 320GB hard drive and video recorder.

It was not the video game market, but the imbedded technology in vehicles that struck me as the most interesting. A typical car is a rolling supercomputer LAN. A typical vehicle contains 50-100 central processing unit’s or Chips. In the next 5-7 years we will see this number increase to 500 CPU’s and the price of the vehicles will decrease because of chip production. The majority of these vehicles will be standardized to Linux. It difficult to believe that the vehicles we drive are just really large computers in retrospect. Other industries will be utilizing CPU’s, including the retail industry.

Something that might be advantageous to large warehouse type stores, Target, Walmart and Home Depot, will be an RFID or Radio Frequency Identification. This is a chip, that when placed on products, will be able to track the products. For example if someone is to steal a product they will not only be aware of who took it, but where it went. This technology would certainly help with theft prevention and at some point may eliminate the need for tellers at these stores.

While consumers are driving the web and technology, businesses are also affected by new technologies. Intel based servers are bringing costs down for businesses. On a different note, while we saw a decrease in dot com industries, not all dot com’s failed. Google started as a dot com and now runs on 150 thousand PC based servers. Google is now offering 1 Free GB of email. The downside is that you must enter all of your information so that Google can send you targeted emails. If you are unwilling to receive these targeted emails, Google will not supply you with an email account.

Marc concluded his speech talking about the WiFi finder and software. WiFi finders are enabling people to use other people’s internet connections without their knowledge. This technology enables people to find a wireless connection before they even boot up their computer; this is something that Marc says he has done. I know several people who utilize this technology. Finally, someone in the audience asked about Software and its rate of improvement. Andreessen said that we are not seeing the same improvement rate in software that we see in hardware. There are a lot more bugs in software, but improving hardware will make it much easier for software developers. Hopefully in the next 5-10 years we will see new and improved software.