The
dawn of the directory decade?
At this
time of year it is usual to look back over the past year to see what historic events and
achievements have been made, and speculate about what the future has in store for us. Of
course, this year everyone will also be looking back over the last decade, century, and
even the last millennium. In our modern world of computers and telecoms, progress has been
exponential. Moore's law was coined to explain the fact that computer power (expressed in
terms of processor speeds) doubles every eighteen months. It is this fact that has led to
the huge growth in computer systems and applications also.
Just think how far we have come this century. The telephone was introduced at about
the end of the last century. The transistor, which made integrated circuits possible, was
invented in 1948. The microprocessor has been around for only about 25 years. Working
together, these technologies have made possible the global computer network that we call
the Internet.
Intel and Microsoft have come to dominate the computing marketplace in less than
twenty years: introduced in 1981, the first IBM PC was based on an 8-bit Intel
microprocessor running Microsoft's Disk Operating System (MS-DOS). What really triggered
the domination of these two companies was the open architecture which allowed third
parties to clone the PC hardware, and develop applications for the operating system.
Previously, proprietary hardware and operating systems, such as IBM's, had restricted
growth. Even UNIX was effectively proprietary because of its many flavours - Linux is,
possibly too late, threatening to do what UNIX was always supposed to do: allow software
portability in an open
architecture.
Computers and networks have become important because of the purposes to which they
are put - the applications. Without an application, a computer is just a curiosity, of
interest only to academics. At any one time a single application, nicknamed a 'killer
application', has tended to dominate the IT market. In the 1980s, it was Lotus'
spreadsheet, called 1-2-3, that drove PC sales and brought about a revolution in
accountancy and financial reporting. In the 90s, it was the word processor, with Microsoft
Word dominating quickly. Word processors had existed in the 80s, but the WYSIWYG interface
of Microsoft Windows made word processing overtake spreadsheets.
I believe that the next decade's killer app will be directory services. End user
applications are stagnating; there will be no more end user killer apps, unless you want
to call Internet access such. But Internet access depends on a network, and a network
depends on being able to find things that are not stored on your machine. This is where
directories come in. But directory services go further than that: they also enable
controls to be put on who can access what, and this is essential if we are to avoid total
anarchy. Directory services are thus really a security device, and security is essential
to enable Internet commerce, which will turn an academic network into a commercial public
network.
Despite its problems over the past decade, Novell is well placed to dominate this
directory services arena. Whilst Microsoft would like to dominate once again, Novell is
well ahead of Microsoft in this field, and Novell Directory Services runs across
platforms, including IBM OS/390, Linux, NetWare, UNIX, and Windows NT. For the first time,
Novell has a killer app that doesn't depend for its success on the survival of NetWare.
Recent threats by the government of the US to split up Microsoft could mean that
Microsoft's mighty marketing machine will not have time to dominate the directory services
market, and could actually lead to co-operation between Microsoft and Novell. Happy New
Millennium to them both.
Geoff Marshall
Editor |
