Techno Musings

I’ve mentioned the sedimentary hypothesis of technology in a few tweets already, and now I wanted to take the time to explain this concept in more detail. Before I get into explaining the hypothesis, let me provide a warm-up in the form of a definition of the process for forming organic sedimentary rock.

Organic sedimentary rocks are formed under varying degrees of pressure and temperature over long periods of time. More pressure and an increase in temperature will form different types of organic sedimentary rocks. When organic material is broken down it becomes peat. Peat is the first step in the organic sedimentary rock process. As more earth accumulates over the peat and causes the peat to come under greater pressure and a higher temperature, then lignite is formed, another type of organic sedimentary rock. After the lignite is formed it begins to undergo a similar process as the peat. More pressure is applied to the lignite and the temperature becomes hotter resulting in the formation of bituminous coal. Bituminous coal then becomes anthracite coal as its temperature and pressure increases. Coal is created under swampy conditions that are not commonly found in our era because it needs higher sea levels to help it form. (Source: eHow.com on Organic Sedimentary Rock)

Obviously what precedes the generation of organic sedimentary rock is a vibrant active ecosystem filled with fauna and flora—both of which can die initiating the process of rock formation. I see technology in much the same way; basically it goes like this:

1. Application – correlates to the vibrant and active ecosystem, but eventually every application or at least some parts of an application “die”, begetting.
2. Middleware/Feature-ware – matches the peat stage of organic sedimentary rock formation and occurs when what were once vibrant applications or several application components transform into a middleware stack or a set of capabilities within an existing middleware stack, and with time and market pressure produce.
3. OS-ware/Infrastructure-ware – is rather like ignite or bituminous coal happening when middleware and feature-ware end up as either features or components  in either the OS or within the infrastructure (e.g. Storage, network or compute), and finally with additional market innovations result in.

Microprocessors, ASICs, ASSPs or FPGAs – realize the equivalent of anthracite coal and are comprised of accelerators, full/partial offloads of capabilities into silicon or assembly-like instructions executing on FPGAs. (Note that complete implementations may never find their way into silicon; however when algorithms arrive on silicon often extreme performance boosts and power consumption reductions are major benefits.) This is the general “hypothesis” that I’ve been referring to, and I think there may even be more sub-cycles within each layer. For example, multimedia functions (e.g. graphics and audio) used to be merely a set of software running on a general purpose processors. Then, over time, the GPUs and other accelerators have arisen, taking moving a large part of this function onto silicon. Now, given even more time, there is a processor from the SoC model to further compress things like GPUs onto a single multi-type many-core processor produced by the likes of Intel or AMD. Another example is in the DBMS world where there are a plethora of open source alternatives to Oracle and NO-SQL systems whose core is available for free. I believe that this shows in the middleware layer there is healthy market pressure/competition resulting in a wide selection of offerings.

A conclusion, and an inappropriate one, is that because of the large number of DBMS technologies, especially with the focus on open source, this market is officially commoditizing.

I have a couple of other posts up my sleeve with some real world examples coming soon. Until then, what do you think? Am I on to something? Can we transform the hypothesis into a theory?