Driving Forces
Confluence of:
- Computing
- personal computers - ever increasing in performance or decreasing
in cost; significant decrease in size and power
- distributed computing
you don't have to care or even
know where parts of the computation take place
- agent technology to serve as your proxy in finding/buying/paying
for/selling/... information and resources
- remote management, configuration, monitoring, ... (http://www.dmtf.org/)
- Communication
- personal communication devices - ever increasing in performance or
decreasing in cost; significant decrease in size and power; readily available
at low to modest cost
- increasing system capacity due to decreasing cell size (for
wireless systems) or backbone capacity (for wire/fiber systems); this has lead
to very significant decrease in price for interconnections (this trend is just
starting)
- change from monopoly PTTs to competitive industry; largely driven
by VLSI and electro-optics - this is changing the depreciation period from the
typical 30 years of telecom operators to the 3 years of computer systems; the
result is that users buy PABXs + service for less than the cost of traditional
exchange lines, users own their own equipment and increasingly their own
infrastructures; very significant changes in telecom traffic; ...
- Media
- change from mass media to personalized information services
- change from state monopoly (or thinly disguised monopolies) to
competitive industry - with increasing numbers of information provides
- radical change in the cost of distribution (due to growth of
Internet) - good a distribution network for all irrespective of size
