Do it yourself

FOR THE past 20 years I have been attending conferences and meetings where convergence in the IT and entertainment industries has been discussed and debated at length. I must confess that I have always been mystified by the whole process.

Talk about the emperor’s new clothes. I just don’t see any evidence of any convergence anywhere, and certainly no time soon. In fact, I see mounting evidence of increasing divergence on the horizon with more devices, operating systems, applications, formats and so on.

I can understand a desire to reduce the number of variants, but diversity always wins out against monocultures, even if monocultures are always the most efficient.

While the choice is ours in principle, it turns out that the pace of technological advancement and the competitive environment make convergence ever more unlikely. For me, long-term survivability always trumps efficiency. In fact, long term always trumps short term and this is being amply supported by the ‘open movement’. Open software, networks, connectivity and access almost certainly guarantee that divergence will continue to expand (excuse the pun) and prosper.

There was a time when a monoculture was close to totally dominating the planet with Microsoft Windows and Office Suite on almost every machine and terminal. But that situation is visibly evaporating rapidly with the rise of Apple and Linux. And while I abandoned MS-based machines and the OS more than 20 years ago, I continued using the MS Office suite in order to be compatible with industry and specific companies who stipulated that specific application set.

However, a few months ago I got the “spinny wheel” followed by another annoying and inconvenient “unexpectedly quit” message once too often. And this was on top of a series of refusals to open documents created in earlier versions of MS Office, plus a few other niggles.

It was as if decades of accumulated frustration and irritation with unexplained crashes, freeze outs and loss of work came to the boil. I spent an hour uninstalling MS Office, followed by a systematic search and delete of anything on my machine with an MS tag.

For months now my laptop has been an “MS-free zone”. Have I encountered any problems? Oh no. Have I found it a good experience? Oh yes. No spinny wheels, no crashes, no freeze outs, no loss of data, no incompatibilities. I should have done this years ago.

Does this mean I will never use Windows and Office again? Of course not. I use a variety of machines and devices in the course of my work; it’s just that nothing I own is now infected by MS software. But then again, I run into Nokia, Samsung, Sony, Motorola et al products too. And like everyone else, I find my way around, make a few errors and get by. It all works, more or less.

For me, and industry, convergence ought not to be a concern if it isn’t visibly happening, but if it does seem likely we should be taking steps to stop it. How come? It is the path to sterility and short-term failures. Diversity is the only way we can ensure our IT survival and prosperity. The much bigger deal that should worry us is compatibility and interworking. And here lies a big opportunity for service providers in the cloud who are ideally placed to solve whatever local problems a world of expanding diversity delivers.

Leading-edge companies no longer provide their people with computers, laptops, pads and mobile phones: people use their own. They choose their devices, OS, apps and modes of operation. Soon, this will become the norm throughout industry and education. At last IT will become like socks and underwear - truly personal, and very diverse. ■