LOOKING BEYOND THE INTERNET OF THINGS
Building an automated system
that can react to all that data like a thoughtful person is fiendishly hard
-and that may be Adam Bosworth's last great challenge to solve
If you have sent email on
Google or used Microsoft's browser or databases, you have touched the
technology handiwork of Adam Bosworth.
Bosworth, a tall and
grizzled but still trim 60-year-old, is a Johnny Appleseed of sorts in the tech
industry , with a penchant for being intimately involved in the creation of
generations of widely used technology .
While it is never easy to
predict what the next big thing will be, identifying what Bosworth is working
on is always good for clues. Right now, along with competitors at companies like
Amazon and Google, he is building what some call a “data singularity.“
Imagine if almost
everything -streets, car bumpers, doors, hydroelectric dams -had a tiny sensor.
That is already happening through so-called Internet-ofThings projects run by
big companies like General Electric and IBM.
All those devices and
sensors would also wirelessly connect to far-off data centres, where millions
of computer servers manage and learn from all that information.
Those servers would then
send back commands to help whatever the sensors are connected to operate more
effectively: A home automatically turns up the heat ahead of cold weather
moving in, or streetlights behave differently when traffic gets bad. Or imagine
an insurance company instantly resolving who has to pay for what an instant
after a fender-bender because it has been automatically fed information about
the accident.
Think of it as one,
enormous process in which machines gather information, learn and change based
on what they learn. All in seconds.
“I'm interested in
affecting 5 billion people,“ said Bosworth, a former star at Microsoft and
Google who now makes interactive software at Salesforce.com, an online software
company that runs sales for thousands of corporations. “We're headed into one
of those historic discontinuities where society changes.“
It is lofty language, no
doubt, but he and others believe they are on the brink of one of the next big
shifts in computing, perhaps as big as the Web browser or the personal
computer.
But building an automated
system that can react to all that data like a thoughtful person is fiendishly
hard -and that may be Bosworth's last great challenge to solve.
It is difficult to say just
how big this business could be, but there are two good indicators: Analysts at
Gartner estimate that by 2019, retail cloud computing -the data centre side of
the equation Bosworth is working on -will double in size, to $314 bil ion. The
sensors on objects will be a $2.6-trillion business, an increase of 250%,
Gartner estimates.
Bosworth went to Harvard
with Bill Gates, where he ook just one class in computers while studying Asian
history. He nonetheless anded a job on Wall Street, where he persuaded his
bosses to give him $1 million or minicomputers -the cutting edge of computing
before personal computers -that could deliver the first nstant reports on how
business was doing.
He got interested in tech's
next big thing, PCs, and wrote an early spreadsheet programme. He joined
Microsoft in 1989. His first years there were spent on databases, but as the
Internet got big he helped turn browsers from software that looks up Web pages
to software that interacts with the Web. He and Gates repeatedly argued over
the importance of the Internet, according to people there at the time. Gates
may also have goaded Bosworth, knowing he is the sort who does not like to be
told something is not possible.
“He sees out into the
future, but not too far that you can't build something,“ said Brad Silverberg,
a Seattle venture capitalist who has known Bosworth since 1981 and was his boss
at Microsoft. “If you want to make sure something gets done, tell him not to do
it.“
The son of a demanding
private school headmaster, Bosworth also clashed with Larry Page, Google's
co-founder and chief ex ecutive, while working there on interactive software
and a failed effort to build online health services.
“We had styles that weren't
synergistic,“ said Bosworth. “He looks intensively at massive amounts of
data-gathering, and assumes he'll be able to do something with it using math. I
was focused on getting people to communicate with other people.“
He left Google in 2007 to
start Keas, an online health management company . He left in 2011 for
Salesforce, but is still on Keas' board.
Marc Benioff, CEO at
Salesforce and a friend of Bosworth, asked him to look at the technology being
used at the San Francisco company , which was founded in 1999 and was one of
the first to use cloud computing technology .
Over lunch a few months
later, Bosworth told Benioff that his once-revolutionary company was in peril.
“Computers are 50 times faster than when Salesforce started,“ he said. “I told
Marc, `There is a whole new technology that is going to overtake you, the way
the Web overtook Microsoft.'“ That technology -the data singularity -is what
Bosworth is now working on at Salesforce.
If he is right, this new
era in computing will have effects far beyond a little more efficiency .
Consumers could see a vast increase in the number of services, ads and product
upgrades that are sold alongside most goods. And products that respond to their
owner's tastes could change product design.
Analysts foresee a scramble
to own and manage these systems and their data, and ever more power accruing to
just a few companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft, which already have the
global computing systems and reach to make it happen. “The idea is turning the
world into a smart object that can be continuously improved, and we couldn't be
more excited,“ said Matthew Wood, the general manager of product strategy at
Amazon Web Services.
Few outfits have the
engineering talent to manage this sort of thing. One year after starting the
business, for example, Microsoft's cloud handles a trillion sensor messages a
week.
Who will ultimately control
that data, from the sensors to the cloud and back, is one of the most
contentious questions in tech. “You've got Amazon knowing everything about
purchasing, Google knowing everything about what people do on the Internet, and
Salesforce knowing everything about the revenue side of a business,“ said Scott
Raney , a venture capitalist. “Lay computer processing on all that, and it's
powerful to a point where a little creepiness sets in; no one else will have
the data,“ he added. “I'm buying the stock of all the companies. I just hope
they'll be benevolent dictators.“
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Quentin Hardy
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©The New York Times
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