Welcome to the next tech revolution: Liquid computing

I was typing an email on my iPad, and I got distracted. Some time later, I set the iPad down on my desk, and an icon on my Mac appeared. I clicked it, and in seconds the Mail app was running with that partially entered email in front of me. That’s the Handoff feature in action, part of the iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite updates that will ship this fall. It’s a sign of a change in computing that Google and Microsoft are also pursuing, not just Apple.

iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite are both in beta, so I can’t really talk about the details of Handoff yet. But I can say it works just as Apple showed off at its recent WWDC conference’s public keynote. Handoff is the first big step into a future where the notion of a device will go through a radical transformation.

[ Mobile and PC management: The tough but unstoppable union. ]

At first blush, what Apple is doing is blurring the lines between mobile and desktop devices. That’s true, but it’s only part of the actual transformation under way. There’s no real name for this transformation yet, so I’m calling it liquid computing until someone else comes up with a better name.

In a nutshell, what Handoff — and liquid computing in general — portends is a world where both data and activities move around as needed. The device isn’t the center of the universe, as it has been since the first computer.

Think back to the early PC era, when people first started getting PCs at home, not just at work. Remember the effort we all spent in making sure we copied our files to a disk for use at home? We had to bring our data with us or else use a network connection to a file share. That model has persisted to this day, which is why the biggest loss of corporate data remains the lost or stolen thumb drive or recordable CD.

But this mentality is now on its way out.

The journey to liquid computing

Several years ago, Google showed us a different way: the cloud as the new center. With Google Docs (now called Drive), you created your documents on its browser-accessible servers and worked on them there, usually through a browser but also via native apps on iOS and Android. You didn’t have to sync your data, because it was accessible from pretty much any device. Unfortunately, Google’s Web-based apps don’t work that well versus what you can do on a smartphone, tablet, or PC native app, so most of us still start with the device and use the cloud as mostly a convenient file share.

Cloud storage services like Box and Dropbox reimagined that file share in a user-friendly way, with similar broad device support. Apple’s iCloud Documents took the same idea but tied it to specific apps, moving us away from the notion of a common file pool to a common activity pool: text documents or spreadsheets or photos. Apple’s initial iCloud Documents approach was too tied to its apps, though, so it hasn’t really expanded beyond Apple’s own applications. (Apple is moving to correct that mistake in iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite.)

Although Handoff is a deeper move into liquid computing, both Google and Apple have taken a baby step already in that direction: Thanks to browser syncing for password, URLs, and so on, users have grown accustomed to the notion that it doesn’t matter what device they have at hand — they can do whatever they were doing and even pick up where they left off, at least for Web activities.

That’s the fundamental notion of liquid computing: Your activities, not just your data, flow from device to device. You might think that’s simply cloud computing in action — it is — but Handoff shows you don’t need the cloud to do this: It uses Bluetooth and Wi-Fi Direct for iOS devices and Macs to “notice” each other’s presence, then compare notes as to what the user is doing on all nearby devices for which that user is signed in. That’s Handoff, and it’s much more powerful than simply making the same data available everywhere.

Apple may be leading this transformation, but it’s not alone. The forthcoming Android L will support Handoff-like interactions between Android devices and Chrome OS computers. Of the main platform vendors, Microsoft is the least advanced in the move to liquid computing, though it talks the talk and has made moves similar to Apple and Google in its syncing across Windows 8 devices and its Google-like mix of native and cloud apps for cloud-stored Office documents.

Businesses will have to toss out their management and compliance notions

When you no longer have to worry about where a file is or where you left off on a task, you’ll work very differently than you do today.

People who’ve adopted an iCloud-centered workflow, a Google-centered workflow, or an Office 365-centered workflow know what I mean: You don’t think about where files are, because they’re wherever you have an Internet connection. You think much less about passwords and bookmarks, thanks to Apple’s and Google’s ability to remember them across devices, which means it’s easier to take care of your needs wherever and whenever.

That wherever and whenever, of course, freaks out most IT shops. After all, most still can’t accept that people work on devices at home and on the road that aren’t under full control of IT, using a standard image, and fully audited. Wait till being able to do whatever wherever becomes a natural activity for employees. If their work systems don’t work the same way, they’ll avoid or bypass them even more.

There is no way to audit such ad hoc workflows that traverse devices and don’t need to go through a common network. Without auditing, you can neither assure compliance, nor really manage security. Ultimately, we’ll have to let go of those notions for the vast majority of data and workflows, using other means to validate access and information checkin/checkout and worrying less about what happens in between.

There are a few glimpses of how compliance and data management will work in a liquid computing world, but only glimpses. Users will again lead the way and introduce liquid computing even as their iT organizations rail against now-quaint notions like BYOD. IT and regulators will either figure it out or again get ignored or even pushed out of the way.

I truly believe that liquid computing will result in a major shift in how we work and think about computing devices. There’ll be mistakes and failure along the way, but the basic notion simply makes too much sense. After all, it’s how people naturally work: We “sync” and adapt through communications, even when under a hierarchical organization, using the tools we can find, not just those given to us.

When computing works more like us, watch out!

This article, “Welcome to the next tech revolution: Liquid computing,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com.