Another of my arti­cles on tech­nol­ogy has popped up at CIO​.com — this one titled “Divin­ing the Future of the Client Desk­top Envi­ron­ment.” In it, I ask if the bell is tolling for the com­puter (client) desk­top as we know it. The piece itself is some­thing I got to think­ing about, pulling together var­i­ous threads fol­low­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with Brian Stevens, CTO and VP, Engi­neer­ing at Red Hat, which I’ve men­tioned before. Most of that con­ver­sa­tion actu­ally ended up being about the Linux desk­top rather than the finan­cial rea­sons to use Linux in the enter­prise. Note on the sec­ond page of the arti­cle, the sec­ond para­graph states (unless it’s been fixed) that the Sugar OS is aware of the device envi­ron­ment in which it runs, but it should state that Sugar is aware of the envi­ron­ment in which the device runs, namely that it knows what other users are online and what they are work­ing on (or at least what appli­ca­tion they’re using) at any point in time.

As I was work­ing on this arti­cle, I thought about some of the things that might be pos­si­ble in the desk­top envi­ron­ments of the future… some things we’ve had glimpses of, and some we haven’t. Only recently has the user inter­face as reimag­ined by Jeff Han appeared in the Win­dows Table­top com­puter as a new par­a­digm for the way in which we inter­face with our PC, and in this desk­top arti­cle I dis­cuss (albeit briefly) a shift toward more col­lab­o­ra­tive ways of work­ing. In this respect, I think that the com­put­ing par­a­digms we have today are still lim­it­ing us some­what from the col­lab­o­ra­tive type of work we could achieve, and the ben­e­fits which we might derive.

Imag­ine a hybrid between Sugar and the Table­top PC where mul­ti­ple peo­ple can edit a doc­u­ment at the same time, and refer to a view which shows updates being made by all of the col­lab­o­ra­tors in real time. Imag­ine this spread through­out an entire project, where all appli­ca­tions includ­ing time track­ing and billing are all aware of one another and what’s going on in the col­lec­tive envi­ron­ment. Imag­ine sit­ting in a project manager’s office, and he’s got a 42″ dis­play hang­ing on his wall that shows the GANTT chart for an entire com­plex devel­op­ment project, down to the last detail. And the dis­play keeps chang­ing in real time as project mem­bers work on the project and pro­vide updates to the sys­tem. A bar at the bot­tom informs him that although they were a week behind sched­ule yes­ter­day, a break­through logged at 10:12 this morn­ing by “Judy N.” caught them up by a full day and a half. She’ll be sin­gled out for spe­cial recog­ni­tion on this one — it won’t be at the weekly sta­tus meet­ing though… those were pretty much ren­dered unnec­es­sary. To show you a closer look at just what the break­through was and where it saved time, the project man­ager stands up and traces a box on the dis­play with his fin­gers, bring­ing up a macro view of one area of the project, show­ing its own GANTT chart with tasks for each team mem­ber. Nota­tions made by Judy N. are dis­played, as well as a shadow view of the orig­i­nal time­line for this part of the project. The project man­ager taps one of the head­ings, trig­ger­ing a popup box with the tal­lied esti­mate that this break­through is going to cut $16,258 from the project costs, plus save the com­pany a $20,000 late penalty on one of the mile­stones. He smiles—wouldn’t you? In “the old days” it would have taken a 90-minute meet­ing with four team lead­ers to extract this infor­ma­tion, and two hours of analy­sis to sort out the impact and cal­cu­late it in dol­lar terms. 9.5 man-hours to find out you’re ahead… by which time, maybe you’re not anymore.

It’s a fairly idyl­lic sce­nario I’ve painted… but it’s not entirely unre­al­is­tic that some­thing not all that far off the mark could be real­ized in the not-too-distant future as we begin to re-invent the client desk­top and the user inter­face, forc­ing them to adapt to the way we work, rather than vice-versa. As this hap­pens, the appli­ca­tions will become more col­lab­o­ra­tive, “know­ing” what infor­ma­tion to share with whom, and how, in order to enhance report­ing and cut down on sta­tus meet­ings. With more pow­er­ful com­put­ing plat­forms, “what-if sce­nar­ios” become eas­ier to run, and a fully inte­grated sys­tem can cap­ture the nec­es­sary data from the rel­e­vant clients in order to project more accurately.

We have another evo­lu­tion (or rev­o­lu­tion) to see occur in our com­put­ing envi­ron­ment to get us there. The arti­cle I’ve writ­ten exam­ines the shift toward online appli­ca­tions with a view to the impact of such a shift on the enter­prise, but I was struck as I thought through the issues that despite the inter­net­work­ing of our com­put­ers, the UI is still pri­mar­ily fash­ioned around sin­gle users tak­ing turns doing tasks on projects, despite the fact that two users sit­ting across a table with­out com­put­ers will work much more col­lab­o­ra­tively than that. The full valid­ity and impli­ca­tions of this obser­va­tion need a but more reflec­tion, but it reminds me that we can go a long way telling our­selves how far we’ve advanced and still not have changed any of the under­ly­ing par­a­digms which hold us back in ways we just don’t see.