The Help Desk will be going away.

It’s important to understand the meaning of the term “Help Desk”. I don’t just mean people who sit around all day with headsets, answering phone calls. It turns out there are a *lot* of people employed in IT whose job it is to just keep the lights on. Vendors, Integration specialists, Sysadmins, and the guy whose entire job it is to  click the right button to clear the printer queue. Entire countries have devoted a lot of resources to greasing the gears of computers. They all work in a Helpdesk somehow.

CTO’s and CIO’s are starting to appreciate that their function at a company isn’t about technology implementation – it’s about how technology can help their business. Who cares if your OS is running Windows or Linux if all you need is a Word processor (and Solitaire). It’s become totally irrelevant.

What matters is the applications that are delivered to the end user; everything else is just implementation dogma. The people doing these implementations are Help Desks too, they’re just a few degrees removed from the end-user and prefer snazzier titles like ‘Application Services Engineer.’

It’s gonna take awhile. The PC will be around for a long time and people still need to type. But as we shift to tiny, integrated, crash-proof devices we need help desks less and less. The intuitive nature of the computer will suggest that it’s no longer important to be adept at using them. Not only that, but as we cycle through generations of people, the technical citizens will supplant the technical immigrants

I’ve been trying this thing lately. Every single time I sit down at my computer, instead of running straight for a website or my email, I try and write something first. What got me thinking about this was a thought I had about how most people spend more time online than watching TV, but the majority of those people are still consuming information.

Take a look at sites like Digg, Reddit, Boingboing, Facebook, etc. You can throw up a few pictures and vote on a few stories but for the most part it’s like watching TV. You didn’t have to create anything to realize the value of those systems – you just had to ‘participate’ by going there.

So what if you could measure the amount of stuff you consumed, and the amount of stuff you created?

Then you could come up with a personal ratio. So lets say for every blog post I write I read 100 websites. That actually seems like a reasonable ratio to me. So my ratio is

1:100

But if you’re not in much of a writing mood for awhile, maybe you’ll read 1000 websites for every blog post

1:1000

Something like this would be cool to track, and I’d be really interested in seeing what the averages are.

On the flip side of things we have a culture of consumerism that is very motivated to satisfy their need for self expression. This desire to  be ‘different’ and express ones individuality is often the motivation behind many purchasing decisions. It influences your decision about what car to drive, or what computer to buy, what software to purchase, or what sweater to wear. Every so often a counter-culture will erupt whose whole purpose is to be hyper-individualistic, hyper-free, or to challenge the status-quo which, ironically enough, is actually a method of self expression in itself.  It’s important to note that Companies are like people in this respect as well. Corporate culture and habit dictates a lot of their purchasing and ‘innovation’ decisions.

What if the need to make things just ‘a little different’ is over. What if we have too many choices? What if we just bundle up all the bits and pieces into something reasonable and say “You can have it in two colours: black and black”

We have two very different systems on our hands. One hand suggests that in order to make a product economically viable you need to have a process which makes millions of them. On the other we have a value system that suggests we customize and change things – in order to satisfy our desire of self expression and individuality. Where one decides to offer the ‘customizable’ part is what will make or break your business (unless of course, you’re in the business of customizing).

The placement and degree of customization have a lot of big implications.

1. The more different you make something, the more combinations of shit going wrong you have to predict and support.
2. More permutations = decrease in instantaneous knowledge transfer. For example, if you could make your iPod work 1000 different ways, when you hand it to your friend they’ll just stare at you and blink – nobody cares if it’s just covered in sequins.
3. Hyper customization results in a situation where you also can’t produce enough of something reliably or cheaply, which results in all sorts of messes. This is particularly interesting in software. What gets included as a feature? What ends up just being a plugin?
4. Usability and interaction / retention can be severely impacted. Where do you draw the line between custom color schemes and layouts, and being able to personalize & express yourself through your purchases instead.

(There are a lot of things these points can be tied into as well. For example, it seems as though people are much more willing to accept less customizable control over something if they’re subscribing to a service or purchasing an object that is indistinguishable from magic)

While many industries are designed with the understanding that we need things “just a little different” it also wastes a lot of resources and in some extreme cases delays progress. While I’m a firm believer that monopolies and globally homogenous environments are a bad thing, it’s interesting that the most successfull companies I know of today are the ones that have convinced people that they dont want things different; they want things the same.

It’s the Model-T all over again. Only now you can get your iPod in a few more colours.

There are quite a few issues with the transparency of costs in the cloud computing space. This includes no transparency into the cost of electricity, and where that electricity is coming from. To date, there is no public database of electricity markets, datacenters, and hosting providers which lists how much carbon per kWh of electricity is being output. In ICT this is a massive issue, because of the sheer amount of energy our industry consumes.

“Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is both a problem and a potential solution in the war against climate change. Currently, computers are responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than airlines. Greenhouse gas is growing exponentially and we expect that ICT will produce double the emissions of the airline industry within five years with no end in site. ICT can provide a solution to climate change by reducing carbon emmission in the world through telecommuting and other means.”

Here in British Columbia we get most of our electricity from renewable hydro-electric power. Hydro-Electric is one of the lowest forms of reliable low carbon output electricity generation available. It goes without saying that providing computing services using energy generated this way would mean less CO2 / kWh but also less CO2 per compute cycle.

We need several things to make this happen

1) Start measuring how much power ICT is using on a per server / component basis
2) Develop resources that track carbon output per kWh in different states & provinces and provide that information as a service
3) Determine where your computing resources are located and track on a per machine level the amount of carbon being output
4) Calculate how much carbon you’re using.

Those are pretty audacious goals, but I think we really need to start keeping track of carbon output for power. By tying that into the different services we use on a regular basis, we can make carbon part of the social and actual cost of using services. Hopefully that will help buy us enough time and money to develop the carbon neutral power solutions we desperately need.

One proof of concept hack I’m going to flesh out is this quick rails app, that with some initial groundwork laid out by Anis, is essentially another RSS reader. Actually its just an unapologetic Popurls ripoff, but I had a good reason for doing it. I like the popurls layout and the concept: Being able to see all the latest ‘buzz’ in one spot. The issue is that none of that information is at all important, but for some reason hitting refresh is really pleasurable. Who cares what the people on Digg and Reddit are saying. Fuck you. I want to know more about Cloud Computing, Cooking, and Sailing, and I want to be able to digest that information with a glance – not browse through it site by site, category by category. Bah! (Its still a long way off from what I *really* want but more on that later)

Anyway, here’s a screenshot. Once I’ve setup OMPL imports, User Accounts and fixed the Background Processing chunk I’ll release version 0.0.1 to the public.

Note: I acknowledge the total uselessness of Slashdot, and I don’t read Al Jazzera – I was just seeing if it would work. I dont know what those words are.

Update: I’ve checked some rudimentary code into GitHub.

Take Amazon as an example. Amazon operates their environment as a bunch of different groups, each running different services within the same company. S3, EC2, Payment Services. They’re all independent, highly scalable functions, tied together in the application we call Amazon.com.

Companies and startups are starting to break this operational model open, and putting those individual functions online for everyone. They’re building services that do something really well – or rather that do one thing really really well. They’re companies that focus on a specific function or feature and are open enough so creative people can say “I’m going to take this, this, and this – mix it in a pot and voila!”.

Do you want to build your own Twitter? Find an SMS gateway, Cloud Computing Host and XMPP service provider.

Do you want to build an interesting RSS/ATOM service? Find an RSS aggregator service and pour on some glue – see what sticks.

It’s Feature as a Service world (to use an already overused description). Eventually cloud companies will realize that doing one thing really *really* well is tremendously valuable. Why does everyone have to build their own DNS service? Why does everyone have to build their own hosting system? What about Enterprise Storage, Authentication, SMS Gateways, Massively scalable XMPP services? How come I have to do that myself? Can 10,000 messages sent through a jabber server be worth a dollar? I think it can (maybe the math needs adjusting but you get my point). We’re all really just building a massive computer called the internet, only with each big trend we replace ‘The Internet’ with something else. First it was ‘The Web’, then it was ‘Web 2.0′, and now its ‘The Cloud’. The fact of the matter remains – the further along we go the more tightly knit the internet becomes, and that means that theres opportunity for programmable white label services to propel us further and faster.

The nice thing about RSS is that you can find the information that you may believe is relevant or of interest to you, then have that information centralized in one place. There are websites that do this for you, such as Google Reader, or Popurls (non-customizable but pretty), and there are systems that aggregate social newtorking sites such as FriendFeed, but there isn’t a single place I can go to ‘push the buttons’ for all the applications I interact with in my day to day life. At it’s simplest RSSI is a simple boolean question with a custom prompt and application identifier.

Would you like to accept a friend request? Yes

PayPal payment failed, resend? Yes

Your virtualization environment requires upgrading, okay ? No

Things can get more complicated with fields and text values being sent along with the response, or even images sent with the interaction. What if you need to sign up for 10 services at once? Send me all the CAPTCHA images then I’ll send you the proper values in text boxes associated with each image.

With regards to implementation, things quickly get heavy, with message bus architectures, authentication and authorization, and a standard framework for describing an interaction with a user and UUID’s for interactions. Prompts, type of responses, values of responses, further action, etc.

I think this would be really cool – We’ve eliminated a lot of the repetitive actions required to get the content, we just need to figure out how to reduce the amount of work required to make things happen.

Let’s take it one step further.

If energy costs are really high then you want to use as  little of it as possible. So how about grabbing compute cycles from a grid that’s in the peak power zone for Solar? It’s cheap to send a few hundred gigs of data to be crunched, but its expensive to work on it. If you could do that, then you could have your capacity for computing literally follow the Sun. Someone has to work out the math on what’s cheaper – moving electricity, or moving the cycles, but my bets on the cycles because I think a mile of fiber costs less than a mile of High-voltage lines.

DC A wants to send a data crunching job offsite. It’s going to check the International Grid Exchange (I just made this up) for cheap capacity somewhere. DC B’s rate is 5.28$/teraflop hour because it’s in Iceland (which has cheap bandwidth and geothermal energy – oh and its cold). DC A’s rate for the same service is $8.22/teraflop hour, so DC A exports that task to DC B, and when it’s done DC A gets the resulting data set – or a trickle of data comes back over the tasks compute time.

Now we have a market where the most efficient winner gets the utilization. True utility computing, true scaling on demand, no market hype or hand waving.

You could even buy Grid ‘Futures’; You want to make sure you get the capacity, or you could prospect and buy chunks of time for resale later on. Basically turning computing into a true commodity.

I hope that’s one way to make computing a lot more efficient.