Came across this speech by Craig Mundie of Microsoft on personalization and next generation personal computing. He asks the question “How will desktop applications of the future look” and makes the point that applications on desktop computers today wait for a mouse click or keyboard input and then try to do something. He envisages a world in which personal computers would be more like personal assistants: anticipating user needs and proactively fetching information that the user may need. An excerpt from his talk

“Today certainly I, and perhaps many of you, enjoy having people who work to help you get things done - an administrative assistant or some type of staff. The great thing about people in those roles is that they are not automatons. They think. They learn about you. They understand what you value. They understand what's important. They make decisions. And, perhaps interesting, they speculate about what might be interesting. And so one of the things I dream about personally is being able to move to where the computer is also able to speculate, to do things on the anticipation that it might turn out to be useful for you

….

We'll see local execution, importantly things that would not be plausible to do at scale in the cloud. Why? Both ends of the wire are built out of the same chip. The only reason you could do some of those things in the cloud is because there's low utilization or slow utilization by the people at the edge. But if the machine actually moves to become fully productive, to anticipate things and to attempt things on your behalf, then, they would be qualitatively different and more valuable”

In other words, the cloud cannot personalize well enough because

• The cloud can do only so much computation for one person. As multi-core desktop computers proliferate, the desktop can spend even more cycles on you than computers sitting in remote data centers
• Parts of the cloud know only parts of you. Amazon knows only about your book purchases, Ebay knows only about the auctions you participate in etc.

This is a very compelling vision and Craig captures its essence nicely. This vision of the world is similar to the one put forth by Esther Dyson recently where she spoke about going from a “search and fetch” mentality to “deliver, act and transact”.

Apart from improving productivity, such speculative fetch and execution should improve privacy as well. A lot of personal data is being sent into the cloud today because of the low utilization on the edge. As computation and decision making shifts to the edge, there will be less need to send personal data to the Internet cloud.