Hybrid Computing

Ever since my report on Transmeta’s announce­ment, there’s been some­thing that’s been bug­ging me: why do we need a 700Mhz chip in a world where the net­work is more impor­tant than the machine? And is that line of thought cor­rect? Is the net­work, as Sun Microsys­tems used to claim, the com­puter? Or is the com­puter the cen­ter of the new net­worked world, as Bill Gates claims? I believe the answer actu­ally lies in the mid­dle, in a new class of devices I would group under the head­ing of hybrid computing.

Why net­work com­put­ers fail

The Denial Of Ser­vice attacks that crip­pled sev­eral web­sites this week show that our increased depen­dency on the net­work is not with­out its faults. I was talk­ing to a friend of mine who was com­plain­ing about not being able to read her email (she’s got a Yahoo! account). Mean­while, other users were deprived of use of their cal­en­dars or address books because they could not access the ser­vice. Did this infor­ma­tion need to always be online? Not really. While the online ele­ment allows porta­bil­ity (being able to get to those appli­ca­tions from any­where in the world… any­where, that is, where you can get access to a net con­nec­tion and a browser) but throws in an extra wrin­kle: you have to have access to a net­work. Any prob­lem with the net­work and the appli­ca­tion fails. Ulti­mately, net­work com­put­ing fails because it tries to offload too much to the server.

Why non-connected devices fails

Mean­while, non-connected devices have taught us that they can do cer­tain things really well but could do them bet­ter if they were con­nected. Not every appli­ca­tion needs to be con­nected (most of the time, I don’t need my word proces­sor to be con­nected) but most seem to be dra­mat­i­cally enhanced by being con­nected. Games? Most of them are inter­est­ing but ulti­mately, com­puter games were a fal­lacy in that they didn’t allow for mul­ti­ple play­ers. The net con­nec­tion allows for that. Busi­ness appli­ca­tions? New lev­els of shar­ing are now pos­si­ble with busi­ness appli­ca­tion, allow­ing teams to be more effi­cient and to work across long distances.

A new par­a­digm: Hybrid Computing

How­ever, those appli­ca­tions can stand on their own. What we are wit­ness­ing is the rise of a new kind of appli­ca­tions and a new kind of com­put­ing: Hybrid Computing.

What is Hybrid Computing?

In order for an appli­ca­tion to fall into the hybrid com­put­ing cat­e­gory, it has to be able to fol­low two conditions:

• The device or soft­ware pro­gram should be able to work on its own, with­out being con­nected to the net at all time.
• The device or soft­ware pack­age is enhanced through its con­nec­tion to the net.

Exam­ples of Hybrid devices and soft­ware packages

While we all already have heard about the Palm VII wired palm­top, a device that offers the func­tion­al­ity of reg­u­lar palm­tops with a lit­tle extra when it comes to con­nec­tiv­ity, there are many other pieces of soft­ware that have not received the same kind of pub­lic­ity. For exam­ple, imag­ine being able to get infor­ma­tion about the CDs you’re lis­ten­ing to while you’re lis­ten­ing to them. Yes, you can do so on your com­puter but now, you can also do so with the TuneBase fam­ily of CDDB-compliant devices, that hook up to your TV and CD player. While still a lit­tle kludgey (one should have all that directly embed­ded into a sin­gle CD player unit, it shows the power of hook­ing up a CD player to the web. The player can get enhanced infor­ma­tion from the web but doesn’t have to in order to work: that makes it a hybrid application.

Lately, I’ve also been play­ing with a new appli­ca­tion from Con­tact Net­works. It’s a sim­ple piece of soft­ware that hooks up to your out­look direc­tory and allows you to exchange elec­tronic busi­ness cards over the web. If, for exam­ple, I update my infor­ma­tion in that con­tact man­ager, the change is sent to the web. If you have the same appli­ca­tion, the next time you syn­chro­nize your address book, my con­tact infor­ma­tion will be made cur­rent in your con­tact man­ager. It’s a great con­cept if peo­ple start using the appli­ca­tion. After all, who really has the time to keep track of ALL the con­tact info lines for every­one they’ve encoun­tered. Once again, this is an appli­ca­tion that takes a non-networked con­cept (address book) and cre­ates an hybrid appli­ca­tion around it.

Those hybrid appli­ca­tions har­ness the power of a local machine and use the net to enhance that power. Either way, they can work on their own or con­nected. And for years to come, until we make the net truly ubiq­ui­tous (have you ever tried using a net con­nec­tion in the New York Sub­way, let alone make a cel­lu­lar phone call?), we will have to live in a world where large areas are off the grid.

Over the next few years, as com­put­ing devices become more per­va­sive, we should start see­ing more of those hybrid devices because after all, the Inter­net is noth­ing more than another evo­lu­tion­ary step in the com­put­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tion world.