Virtualization - the latest techno buzzword
May 7th, 2008 by Republican By DefaultI’ve been around or in the computer industry since the Altair 8800 appeared in Popular Electronics magazine in Dec. ‘74 and Jan. ‘75. I’ve seen a lot of new technologies splash onto the scene. I’ve seen a lot of them sink and I’ve seen some swim for varying lengths of time.
Some new ideas really are new ideas. Most are just a rehashing of old ideas from other sectors of the industry or other industries altogether (the entertainment industry has provided some ideas along the way).
Most of the micro-computer industry’s ideas were taken from other places, most notably Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). It’s the home of Mac’s graphic user interface (GUI), Ethernet, our current email approach and some others of lesser note.
As new ideas come along they initially face the uphill climb of distinguishing themselves from other ideas, some of which are solid and established, some may have failed in the past and some of which are doomed to fail. Those that are able to establish themselves (speaking metaphorically) have a shot at catching on. Unfortunately, in some cases, the ones that catch on aren’t the best ideas.
Take MP3 compression technology that we carry around on our MP3 players and phones. It’s not the best compression technology available. It wasn’t even the best when it caught on. But it did catch on so it has become part of the technology landscape.
Some ideas aren’t just a single idea but are a conflagration of other ideas. In some ways Microsoft has made this approach the platform of it’s innovation strategy. I like to call it ‘innovation by conflagration’, or to put it another way, “throw it all together and make it work”. They’ve done a pretty good job of it over the years, but they don’t always make it work the first time out. I’m sure you’ve see all of the service packs and updates that load onto your computers over time. But eventually, they do pretty well with this approach.
Virtualization is one of those areas that seem to be a conflagration of sorts. Although Wikipedia is subject to marketing hype that obscures real meanings, I’m going to quote the first paragraph of their description of virtualization:
In computing, virtualization is a broad term that refers to the abstraction of computer resources. Virtualization hides the physical characteristics of computing resources from their users, be they applications, or end users.[1] This includes making a single physical resource (such as a server, an operating system, an application, or storage device) appear to function as multiple virtual resources; it can also include making multiple physical resources (such as storage devices or servers) appear as a single virtual resource;[2]
What they’re describing here is simply the makings of a good user interface. Generally speaking, the more technical information needed to understand how to do someone on a computer, the more difficult it will be. Simply put, computer technology is not intuitive to the average user. It’s abstract and complicated.
A good user interface presents only the information that a user needs to accomplish a task. Not enough information and they miss a step. Too much information and they can get confused. The trick is to present just the right information that the user needs in order to do what he (or she) needs to do.
In order to save a file to a disk you don’t need to know if it’s MFM or RLL, or if it’s using ATA, SATA or SCSI. You don’t need to know the sectors per track or the tracks per side or even how many actual disks are involved (there usually are more than one). So a good user interface handles most of that information for you.
Instead of all of the details you’re asked to choose a folder to put the file in and to give the file a name. In some cases you’ll be offered a choice of file ‘formats’, but even those are listed in understandable terms.
Microsoft is one of the companies that has added ‘virtualization’ to it’s strategic mission statement. What this means for most people is that they’ll make computers easier to use. This is a good thing.
So, will the term ‘virtualization’ become part of the technology landscape? I don’t know for sure. Sometimes we need to rename old concepts to make them understandable. For instance, instead of saying, “MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 digital audio encoding format”, we just say “MP3″. The term ‘virtualization’ is somewhat easier to understand than ‘abstraction’ because we use the term ‘virtual’ in computer speak all the time.
So we wait and see whether this term will catch on. If not, no loss to us. The concept will live on because it makes computers easier to use.
