Deja Vu All Over Again

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, IBM continues to flatter Microsoft with effusive sincerity.

I was reading an interview on MIT's Technology Review site today with Kristof Kloeckner, the vice president of strategy and technology for IBM's software group. He discusses IBM's "Information On Demand" concept. This is software that lets you see patterns, trends and other meaning in data. It is IBM's version of the visualization innovations that many companies are now pursuing to make it easier to sift through the vast amounts of data available today for useful, reliable information. (Here is a great example of this.)

Hmm, "Information On Demand" sounds vaguely familiar. Why, yes, it was way back at Comdex in 1990 that Bill Gates gave his famous "Information At Your Fingertips" speech. I dug up some articles about that speech. In it, Gates said:

"Someone can sit down at their PC and see the information that's important for them. If they want more detail, they ought to just point and click and that detail should come up on the screen for them...All the information that someone might be interested in, including information they can't even get today."

Gates spoke of the PC as an aggregator of data. He spoke of search. He spoke of applications that could exchange and share data. He made the case that the PC was ideal for displaying and making sense of all of this, and he did so before there was a worldwide web.

Gosh, those marketing types at IBM are worth every cent they are paid. Substituting "on demand" for "at your fingertips" is certainly a vast leap forward.

I know that "on demand" is a trendy phrase for software-as-a-service and utility computing offerings and such, and IBM has done a lot of branding with it, but really, where has all the creativity gone?

Copyright © 2007 Philip Bookman

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