Full circle...

I recall a meeting I had about 12 years ago when the internet was just being commercialized. I was with PeopleSoft at the time and I had just been promoted to the role of Technology Director for PeopleSoft Canada. One of the sales people at that time approached me and asked if I could accompany her and her sales team (comprised of an HR solutions consultant) to a meeting at a steel company in Hamilton.

After arriving there, setting up the projector, etc and completing the functional review of PeopleSoft as well as some high level technology discussions around the early web based architecture, etc, the main technical lead from the client side sat there and pronounced his displeasure with what he had heard. According to him, this client/server thing was just a fad and it was going to go away. "Everyone is going to scurry back to the mainframe!" he so proclaimed.

There I sat dumbfounded thinking, who is paying this guy? A company is actually paying him a salary to think this way? Wow! Here is a very intellectual person (he had several good questions during the presentation which led me to believe he had a great background and great skills), running the IT dept for a large steel manufacturer that actually supplies the raw material we use to build cars and hospital equipment and other important things, proclaiming the end of client/server computing...how wrong can wrong be I thought...WOW! This guy is kookoo!

Well here we are folks....its 2009 and all of a sudden I am thinking this "washed up" mainframe guy with gray hair, a pocket protector containing a calculator, a pen and a several hand written notes all in his shirt chest pocket wasn't crazy afterall!

I am sure we have all heard of the latest craze around the industry...something called "Cloud Computing"...well guess what..."old Steel company mainframe guy" was right all along...Could Computing is nothing more than a large infrastructure handling multiple users, from potentially different companies, with different applications and different databases. Hey, wait a minute? This sounds alot like what was referred to as "Service Bureau" computing back in the 70s and 80s. Only difference is, the client platform is no longer a dumb terminal. Its a sophisticated UI that is self managed and for the most part downloaded from a backend somewhere. Think Adobe Flex, Ajax, Java Script, etc. All of these require no "user intervention"...they simply download install and work as a "driver" from the commands coming from the server and very eloquently and simply provide a rich user experience....the goal from way back in 1985 when client/server was just being invented!

So after, many many years, a host of Microsoft gazillionaires and an entire era in computing - the I will refer to now as the "lost years!" - the whole approach was wrong from the get go! All because of a pretty screen! If someone had invested the time to think through how best to send data and UI information to a workstation instead of having the workstation generate the UI on its own, we would probably be much further ahead today from an ROI and innovation perspective.

Oh well, we are back on track now, finally! although the client/server legacy guys (I thought I would never say that!) still think Cloud Computing is a fad...