There is a lot of talk in the press today about big data and
how revolutionary it is. Is the technology associated with big data
revolutionary or is this just market clutter? Is big data just the
natural evolution of technology as digital computing transitions
from the fourth era to the fifth era of computing?
What are some rules that you can use when reading articles about technology
to separate geninue technical advances from market clutter?
The Structure of Digital Computing is by and large
silent on the importance of design. The biography
about Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson discusses how important design
is to the success of various Apple products. What is the
relationship of technology innovation and design in technological
products?
Chapter 2 of Structure of Digital Computing discusses
how time and space have been commoditized, as well as processing
cycles and disk storage. Which has a bigger impact on your typical
day: the commoditization of time and space or the commoditization of
computing cycles and disk storage?
Chapter 4 talks about technology adoption cycles and the fact
that the adoption of a new technology can take a decade or more, and
creating the technology in the first place can take even longer.
Does innovation in your field (or in art or in literature) take
more time or less time than innovation in digitial computing?
What are the five most important innovations in your field
during the past fifty years? Are these generally recognized by
people in your field? By people outside of your field?
Section 3.11 describes the Internet as an inside out telephone
network in the sense that the Internet has a "dumb center" with
smart edge devices, while the telephone network had a "smart center"
with dumb edge devices. From this perspective, how would you
describe Era 4, the era of clouds of devices?
Chapter 5 talks about big data but does not mention
information theory. James Gleick's book The
Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood tells a
fascinating story about information, information theory, entropy,
and related ideas. By and large, information theory has not been
applied to big data. Discuss some of the ways that information
theory could be applied to big data.
Clayton Christensen in his book the The Innovator's Dilemma defines a
disruptive innovation as a process by which a new product or service
takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market
and then moves "up market" to eventually displace established
competitors. Disruptive innovations typically create new markets.
In contrast, the term sustaining innovation is sometimes used to
describe the improvement of a product or a technology in an existing
market. Which of the products and services described in the book are
disruptive innovations in this sense? Which are sustaining
innovations? Do you think that big data will create disruptive innovations?
In his book, Living
with Complexity, David Norman writes "One way to simplify
an otherwise complicated situation is by adding
structure. ... Another way to simplify is to reconceptualize" (page
230). David Norman also writes (page 5) that the key to coping with
complexity in technology is to "[take] the time and effort to understand the
structure." From this point of view, discuss some of structures and
conceptual frameworks that Structure of Digital Computing
uses to simplify the technology of digital computing.
