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Evolutionary in Technology, Revolutionary in Impact
An interview with Ken Klingenstein, Internet2 Director of Middleware and Security
4/25/2007
Given all these areas for development, will there need to be a more hierarchical structure to Internet applications? How will all of this change be managed? As you engage in all of these collaborative applications going forward, we don't think there's going to be an uber-app--there's not going to be one application sitting on top that controls and presents everything. Instead, you're going to wind up using a bucket of apps. And you're going to want to have some consistency across those apps. We are just now starting to understand some of the consistencies of experience that users will need going forward--having a consistent search experience, for example, so that the commands that one uses to manage search in Google would be similar to those on the desktop. [Other examples are] consistent metadata and digital objects. I think it's those rivers of consistency of experience that we need to really move ahead on in those next few years of frontier, and it's part of the collaboration infrastructure out there.
A last thing I want to mention goes back to the problem of an embedded base. There was a parable I heard about 15 years ago when we were debating as a community some changes to TCP/IP that eventually resulted in IPv6. During the debate period, there was a lot of tension among various ideas being floated. And I remember one day hearing that a newspaper had written that there was a big clash of intellectual titans going on. One of the titans happened to drive their car into a repair shop that day, and the guy in the repair shop said, "Isn't that you in this newspaper article?" The driver said, "Yes, that's me." And the repairman went on, "What's so hard about all this? It's like you're just going to take out the spark plugs and put in new ones, right?" And the driver's response was, "Well yeah, but try to do that with the engine running." I think that illustrates a lot of what our challenge is right now. We have a lot of infrastructure that's built one way. And we're trying to add security, privacy, and a consistent set of experiences. But we can't stop the engine while this is happening. So, I think this has led us to look for approaches that are evolutionary in technology and revolutionary in impact. That's a tough bill to meet.
[Editor's note: Ken Klingenstein will give the opening keynote, "Leading in a New IT Environment," at Campus Technology 2007 in Washington, DC, July 30-August 2. www.campus-technology.com/conferences/summer2007]
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