Dot Com is 25

I didn’t know this, but “.com” turned 25 recently.  The history behind it (my bold):

It was on this date in 1985 that a now-defunct artificial intelligence company out of MIT registered something called symbolics.com. It was an unheralded event, and at least a decade passed before the public really began to catch on.

Remember trying to “surf the Web” in the early 1990s? If so, you were well ahead of the curve. Once you got there, you might have wondered if all the waiting and listening to dial-up modem screech and whine was worth it. “Maybe this thing will go the way of CB radios,” you might have thought. Luckily, it didn’t.

Today, there are a quarter billion Web sites, 80 million of which are dot-coms.

Yeah, I guess you could say that was successful.  Isn’t that number staggering?  I remember when I first used the web in the mid ‘90s at a previous employer.  I thought it was cool, but I wasn’t sure how to use it.  3.5” floppies seemed like the better path…to me…at the time.

Mobility on the Move

The Herman Trend Alert is a weekly email that spans a wide range of topics with IT trends being one of the more popular topics.  This week’s email offers some trend details on mobile computing.  First, a stat that surprised me:

Interestingly, in the United States and Japan, mobile worker penetration has essentially peaked. Outside of those countries, there are large worker populations that are still growing.

I would think mobile workers are still on the upswing in this country, but the recession may be putting a damper on those numbers.  But here is the reason why:

Moreover, the key findings reveal the US will remain the most highly concentrated market for mobile workers with 75.5 percent of the workforce, or 119.7 million workers, being mobile by 2013. By percentage, Japan is a close second at 74.5 percent.

Asia/Pacific excluding Japan (APeJ) represents the largest total number of mobile workers throughout the forecast, with growth to 734.5 million or 37.4 percent of the total workforce in 2013. By this time, 62 percent of the world’s mobile workforce will live in the APeJ region.

We’re already well saturated in this country.  As the report states, the mobility software market is going to be huge.

IT in the Cloud

Get used to it – the term “cloud” is becoming ubiquitous in the IT world.  ZDNet offers up a futuristic look at a clash between two titans – Google and Apple (and somehow Wal-Mart is forgotten in the opening, but not in the story).  First, a primer on cloud computing:

…the holy grail of digital media – a cloud-based shelf where collections of music and movies and probably photos, too, will be housed for streaming playback anywhere there’s a Web connection, including a mobile phone or a fancy new tablet.

And in this corner, Apple:

Apple certainly has the lead here with its popular line of iPod and iPhone – and soon the iPad – devices to keep people engaged with and entertained by their digital media libraries. But they want to make sure you have plenty of storage to buy buy buy even more digital content – so they’re taking a play out of the Google playback to push the cloud. First, it was music. Now, it’s movies.

And in the other corner, Google:

Google, which is also making some moves toward content in the cloud, is big on multi-platform and open source these days and the idea of being able to stream content to all devices – instead of just those behind the proprietary iWall – is something that the content providers, as well as consumers, could prefer.

For me, I see the open source option of Google having better legs at this point.  Apple gets customer because of their astute marketing department.  It is cool to own Apple anything.  They have excellent products and are consumer savvy, but they are still a proprietary platform for lack of a better phrase.

My guess is that Google plows a new path for open source options that eventually win the market share war.