In one way or another, I’ve been lucky enough to be involved in a few significant technology waves – from the microcomputer/PC revolution of the 1970s and 80s, through networking, virtualization, and cloud waves, to today’s explosion of artificial intelligence.
As an observer of the technology market and active participant in some of these technology waves, I believe that the technologies that achieve rapid, broad acceptance do so because they develop communities. These communities facilitate the exchange of knowledge and skills needed to bring the new technology from a gleam in some vendors – or more likely some clever engineer’s – eye to an accepted way to do business.
The truth is, any engineer or vendor will have a limited perspective. Engineers are problem solvers. But, like in the old parable about the blind men who meet an elephant, their limited perspective leads them to solve only the parts of the problem they see. Just as no plan of battle survives contact with the enemy, no vendor really knows how their product will be best used until they see some clever customer using their tech in a way they never envisioned.
So, communities develop to exchange knowledge, skills, code snippets, and – perhaps most importantly - the war stories that create true best practices. These communities draw smart technologists, from not only the vendors that have skin in the game, but also from the customers implementing the technology. Additionally, they draw in those who seek to accelerate the acceptance of the new technology. For example, those who offer services and ancillary products, from software utilities to water cooling gear, to help with the tremendous amount of heat GPU servers can generate.
While we haven’t really figured out why communities develop around some technologies and not others, we can say that vendor support is key in the early stages. There are bills to pay, and vendors are the ones with money in the early stages. Vendor support needs to come with a loose hand on the reins. Communities don’t take a huge amount of money to get off the ground, but they do need nurturing.
Too often, I’ve seen fledgling communities for technologies where the vendors involved tried too hard to control the message. They realized too late that customers and the all-important smaller vendors that fill the holes the big vendors can’t want to be members of a community as well, not just sit in the audience.
Communities are also, to some extent, defined by the technologies of the time. The microcomputer community formed from local user groups like The Homebrew Computer Club, a place where two guys named Steve first showed the world a computer named after a fruit. The club’s early newsletters turned into some of the magazines that spread the word about personal computers to a broader audience. Computer Shopper followed, containing my first bylined article and a long list of BBS phone numbers. And by the time the networking/NetWare community gathered, organized CompuServe forums replaced the more laissez-faire BBSes and mimeographed newsletters.
The internet has been the communication medium of choice in the twenty-first century. The virtualization community coalesced around blogs and later social media like Twitter, YouTube, and podcasts. This wave brought bloggers and influencers to prominence and extended to include in-person meetups, such as VMUG, OUG and the ever-popular vBeers meetups. The subsequent cloud and DevOps communities shifted their communications nexus to web forums like StackOverflow, Reddit, and, of course, GitHub to help the world make the transition from waterfall to agile development.
Mark Twain once famously said, “History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes.” To my somewhat aged ears, AI sounds a lot like I remember virtualization and DevOps sounding. Like virtualization led to cloud transformation and DevOps transforming and accelerating software development, AI promises to transform how every application is built and deployed in the future. AI is fundamentally different from how corporate IT has traditionally done things, and it can only succeed through the support of a vibrant community spreading the word about what works and what doesn’t. As I reach the end of my career, I’m excited to be a part of this next great technology wave. I think I’ve got one more of these in me and this one promises to be big.
