Why would I do such a thing? Why would anybody? Simple – it fills (or at least promises to fill)  a major void and lots of gaps that many of us have. Anybody with one arm longer than the other from lugging around laptop poundage knows that light, powerful, practical — AND fun, slick, cool — is quite a gap filler.

Most of all, though, is that it won’t be long, in my humble opinion, before business and personal computing is forever blurred by the phenomenon of  ”bring your own device”. That device can be an iTouch, iPhone, iPad, iMac — i-anything — as much as it can be a net book, tablet PC, laptop, desktop, smartphone or even Web TV.

It will soon make little sense for companies to be acquiring, distributing, managing and dealing with PCs for individual workers (except for the shop floor or other dedicated or location and function-specific scenarios). Indeed, many people have gear at home that is better and faster than the crippled, locked-up, expensive and unfriendly standard-issue work machine that they get every four years or so.

Desktop virtualization, what some call the “dynamic desktop” is the answer that abstracts the user personalization and experience from the actual device. Corporate policies and security are managed at the server and most any device can be supported for access to the company’s e-mail and internal business systems. Even more sophisticated and powerful applications such as engineering can even be served up to the right device.

Back to the iPad. I am a road warrior. I am sick of lugging things around. I use the devices that I want to use and work with my clients to connect to portals and the cloud rather than taking one of their laptops. The iPad form factor will be copied, morphed and will ultimately be a metaphor for a simple, functional and WOW device that can connect to something like Citrix’s XenDesktop and act like a work machine when it needs to.

So, it is not so important that it is Apple. They have simply shown that they are the current kings of tapping in to the unmet needs of the market which is causing a movement away from the malware infested, middling laptops and PCs that can’t do much of anything practical anymore.

©2010 Tomko Tek, LLC All Rights Reserved. iPad picture grab Copyright © 2010 Apple Inc. All rights reserved

By George M. Tomko

Many cloud computing boosters use the selling point that establishing large amounts of storage or computing requires no “up-front capital investment”.  Pleading before the gods of capital within corporations has been a bane for IT and business operations functions forever. All those appropriation request forms and cash flow analyses – not much fun when you want the servers installed and the software loaded.

What has always been interesting to me is that more thought, analysis, decision-making and accountability goes in to managing the capital investment portfolio than you often see in managing operating expenses. The irony here is that “op-ex” is very often many multiples larger than the “cap-ex” spend in any given fiscal period. If a $400 million company (in terms of revenue) has an operating profit of 20%, then the company managers spent $320 million with likely much less oversight than the $15 million that they might have spent on projects.

At the  end of the day, there is no free lunch. Just like leasing became the way to ensure “technology refresh” every 3 years, let’s make sure that cloud computing and all something-as-a-service offerings don’t wind up costing your company more or that the standards of decision-making are usurped by being able to fly more stuff under the financial controls radar.

The saying “you can pay me now or you can pay me later” became a “tag” line in old oil filter commercials where the idea was that you might pay more now for a premium filter but you would be avoiding the cost of replacing the entire engine later.  Of course, the assumption is that you would own the car long enough for this to pay off.  This was in the era when the majority of people traded-in and bought new cars in 3 or 4 year cycles.  Not long after, 3 year leases perpetuated the cycle.

The reality, then, was that most people wound up paying now and they got to do it over and over because later never came!

Another myth that is related is the 3,000 mile oil change. Again, another marketing bonanza because it got people to pay to replace their oil and filters twice as often as the auto manufacturers recommend in the owner manuals.

So back to op-ex and cap-ex and buying infrastructure/software/platforms as-a-service. If I take the op-ex view, it is almost always an incremental view as in year-over-year budgets and the dearth of zero-base reviews. If I take the cap-ex view, everything is an investment and is evaluated as cash-flows over a defined “economic life”. This takes rigor and commitment and the potential for more eyes to see and more ears to hear.

It is not a bad thing to have the option of paying for something as a service. However, it is a bad thing if the selling point is that you get to relieve yourself of the burden of evaluating and justifying the all-in costs of doing it one way or another.

Remember, you can pay now or pay later. Some times, it is nice to get to pay later.

What do you think. Please leave a comment.

©2009 George M. Tomko All Rights Reserved

This is about the 20 millionth blog post or article that has been written with some reaction to last week’s *new* Google Chrome OS announcement. For the most part, it was a surprise announcement – mostly because it was not leaked to the press.

I have posted about Google in a mostly positive light (“Google: No brag, just fact”; “What’s the Thing with Bing?”) but I do not own any Google stock or have any financial interest whatsoever, directly or indirectly. And, my point-of-view is going to be widely different than most of what is out there. Since I am not wedded to any particular technology, all I have to ask is, why would or should I care (as a CIO, consultant, consumer, etc.)?

I have read some great posts (PC Mag’s Michael Miller; CIO.com’s Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols) that have really thought out and carefully presented the author’s arguments in the following major categories: 1) Microsoft killer; 2) Linux killer; 3) gives Google the keys to the world; 4) is it really ‘open’;  5) is this really ‘new’? All good questions and perspectives, but the answers don’t really mean much.

So, to the fundamental question: why would I (or you) care? I guess I would care if it changed my (or your) life in some way or another, positively or negatively. So, if I am a CIO, I might be concerned about this throwing a monkey-wrench into my carefully thought out strategic technology plan.

Maybe I was planning on rolling out Windows 7. But, now, I might be worried that I am going to be playing the IT version of the game “52 card pick-up”.

Now, as a consultant, I might welcome all of this uncertainty. Consultants get rich when there is a lot of head-scratching going on and someone has to come in and tell the folks what to do.

As a technologist, I might be fuming (or celebrating) that this is going to be marginalizing the good work of the open source community and related foundations that have coordinated and sponsored projects to get some cohesion in a smaller set of more robust Linux distros. Why might I be upset? With Google “branding” and financial might, they might be a force that pulls from, rather than nurtures, the continuing development of mainstream (read Ubuntu) Linux. On the other hand, I might now have many more opportunities to work on the newest of the new things.

As a consumer, I can already get a netbook with Linux and OS X on a Mac, will there be something magical that happens with new product capabilities?

Naw. Bottom line is that the CIO will move forward, as planned.  The technologists will have spirited debates like they always do and groups will splinter off – as they always do. As a consumer, I’ll just be wondering what new feature I will get to pay for in some new gadget.

At the end of the day, it is all about innovation, competition and all the things that need to keep happening to advance the state-of-the-art and either create new value or steal more share of what is already there. Microsoft still stands out in the ‘crowd’. Of course, that ‘crowd’ is becoming one of more or less equals.

And I never, ever, thought that Java would be an Oracle product.

So things change.

And that is exactly what we want. Without it, we still might be running Windows 98 SE. There is so much stuff out there, it will be decades of disruption before the things we talk about now are as ho-hum and boring as telephones, flushing toilets and electricity.

Until then, it will be like Al Bernstein once said, “Success is often the result of taking a misstep in the right direction.”

©2009 George M. Tomko All Rights Reserved