SaaS Blogs

Truly ubiquitous computing, or computing that happens without a discernable ‘computer’, is a concept that is looming within the undertones of current mobile device trends.  A combination of technologies are allowing the physical scope of computing to grow by, ironically, shrinking requirements.  Right now, the key obstacle is not the creation of ubiquitous hardware (look how small and amorphous devices are these days), but rather the removal of software confinement and requirements.  The bloat of traditional operating system is perhaps the single biggest weight on the back of the ubiquitous computing movement.  The challenge becomes creating a functional, robust, environment for computing that doesn’t expose the ubiquity of the hardware.  The answer might just be to do away with the operating system, and pull the software off of reliance on devices altogether.

I’ll use a current example to illustrate:  There’s been much ado about Microsoft’s path to Vista - common topics of discussion include release delays, technology changes, similarities to Apple’s OS X, and so on.  The conversations abound with questions about Microsoft’s intentions, concerns over OS marketshare, and so on.

If you’re a Microsoft shareholder - and to a small extent, everyone with a Windows-based PC is - you needn’t be worried about Microsofts intentions for the operating system.  To me at least, it looks like Microsoft has already moved beyond the OS (although Vista is their best effort in the arena to date, by far) - they know that ubiquitous computing will require software that can fit anywhere… or nowhere at all.  Nowhere visible to the user at least - hence the Windows Live movement.

I’m here to tell you that the real topics that need to be discussed are Microsoft’s pushes in the embedded device realm; and especially their efforts towards headless (and therefore ‘embed-able’) servers.  These concepts are the cornerstone of ubiquity, the foundation for computing in the future - the idea that the chair you are sitting in could be a web server, feeding data about your weight, favorite sitting position, alerting you that you’ve been sitting too long… operations that don’t require an operating system as we know it today, but rather embedded tools that work directly with the situationally available hardware and communicate with hosted environments accessible from anywhere else you might work.

Now, how does Apprenda fit into this?  Easy.  Software as a service is the natural bridge to ubiquitous computing.  If you are accessing software applications that ‘live’ in remote locations and are available to you wherever (and however) you wish, then you have made a giant step towards ubiquity.  The same software is available to you in your web browser, on your mobile device, and in the future, any device that you interact with on a daily basis.  For now, at Apprenda we call this ‘Unfettered Computing’… but as the operating system goes the way of the dodo, and we see more devices with embedded utilities used only to access hosted software (imagine a computer - desktop, laptop, PDA, refrigerator, whatever, that boots straight to a browser and a hosted environment) we will be making giant steps towards ubiquitous computing.