We just announced that NetQoS Unified Communication Monitor works with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Release 2 [OCS 07 R2] this morning, and while it’s easy to get into the small details of how unified communications applications place great demands on the network, and how to handle those demands, I found myself pausing for a moment.
Where, exactly, are we going with this?
And by “we,” I don’t just mean NetQoS as a company but I mean – Us. The big Us. The human condition.
That is, unified communications applications do place more demands on the network than any other type of data that’s come before it. So, why then, do we even do it in the first place?
It’s because treating voice and video as data to be sent over the network allows us to do more with the communication-as-data than we could with the analog alternatives, even if this makes the network as a whole slightly less effective due to congestion – or if you have good performance monitoring information perhaps no less effective, but perhaps more complex. (We try to simplify the complexity as best we can, by using metrics directly from OCS 07 R2, but the necessities of a mixed communications and data network are simply more complex than the needs of a pure data network alone.)
Everything is becoming binary data, and this process is not likely to stop. To those of earlier generations, the New York Times is a newspaper; to many of the young, the New York Times is a news Web page with video and audio content; text and images being one of many offerings possible. A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that it would be cheaper, over the course of a year’s subscription, to send every New York Times subscriber a free Kindle E-book reader – at retail prices, no less – and send the newspaper to them digitally, than it costs to print out and deliver all those physical papers to the subscribers.
It doesn’t take long to realize three things: Technology is getting cheaper, paper and distribution is getting more expensive, and the market of people who read the New York Times but will only do so if they have a physical piece of paper are dying out. The Grey Lady will become data, or there will be no Grey Lady.
Every advantage of the physical paper – portability, permanency, and simplicity, is being lost as technology becomes more portable, more permanent, and simpler. Our standards for digital technology to replace the more traditional equivalent are relatively low. Assuming it takes two and a half seconds to locate an article by flipping through the pages, any system that can serve up a Web page in less than 2500ms is an improvement. Even the sheer scale involved – that you would measure the time it would take to find an article in milliseconds rather than seconds – implies an entire quantum leap from the old way of doing things.
Those of us who work closely with the Web – bloggers, Web designers, media professionals – are aware of CSS, which removes content from layout, and RSS, which removes content from context. How far can we be from a society in which all content is completely removed from any sort of context or layout? A society where everything is abstracted? Where you could download the model of a basketball, and print it out on a 3D printer. Or even, if you wish, have the New York Times printed daily on a basketball, if you so chose…
But in that world, where everything is data, network performance suddenly becomes one of the most important things in the world. The bottlenecks once caused by the unfortunate limitations of pure physics suddenly give way to a single bottleneck – that of network performance.
Digitization is an awesome and powerful force… and while it has been mostly beneficial, I think that too often we do not recognize the power of this inexorable tide – this benevolent but gargantuan inevitability.
I don’t know if I’m ready for that world. I’m not sure I want my news to bounce.
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