Device independence

Some people wear their cars. Others just drive them. If you saw my beat-up ’96 Civic, you’d know I belong in the latter group. I feel the same way about computers. It’s always a thrill to unpack a new one, but I hate the process of migrating applications and data, and I resent the dependency created by doing so.

InfoWorld CTO Chad Dickerson asked me recently if I had switched completely to Mac OS X. Nope. I’ll never put all my eggs in one basket. So I wander like a gypsy from machine to machine, from Windows to OS X to Linux to FreeBSD.

There are methods to my madness. First, I’m devoutly agnostic when it comes to platforms. Each has unique strengths, and I want the best of all worlds available to me. Second, I anticipate the day when computers are as interchangeable as cars. We’re not nearly there yet, but science fiction writers have long imagined what this would be like. In an airport, conference room, or classroom, you authenticate (by voice, fingerprint, retinal scan, and/or token) to a utility computing device (kiosk or commodity notebook/tablet). Your preferred user interface flows to the device, along with some transient data, but when you’re done there remains no trace of activity. Your permanent data lives in the cloud, where it’s safely replicated and securely managed. Your applications live there too, in known stable configurations.

Owning a highly-configured device means that the device, in some sense, owns you too. At a meeting I attended last year, somebody switched the PowerBooks of two attendees “for fun.” It would have been a cute prank, but when we discovered that one of the victims had left with the wrong computer, the joke turned sour. If your computer gets lost or broken, it feels as if you’ve had a stroke. And in a way, you have. Andy Clark is a cognitive scientist and author of Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. He argues in the book that since the era of the clay tablet, our minds and our information devices have co-evolved. When your laptop shatters on the floor it isn’t phantom pain that you feel, it’s real pain.

How do we reach the sci-fi nirvana of commodity computing, a world in which our prosthetic minds are truly interchangeable? Ubiquitous, high-speed networking is the brute-force solution, and I might live to see it. But in the near term, connectivity will remain intermittent and variable. That means we need devices that can work autonomously. To do so they must be configured in ways that are complex and hard to maintain.

Groove’s message-oriented architecture is one elegant way to solve this problem. For a team of collaborators, Groove synchronizes both the sets of applications available in a given context (or “shared space”) and the data written by those applications. If you drop your laptop on the floor you can effortlessly recover everything into a fresh instance of Groove on a new machine.

Of course this works only for native Groove apps. Browser history and bookmarks, Outlook settings, and a million other things are handled in a million other ways — or not handled at all — because desktop operating systems aren’t Groove. A general solution would require OSs that work like Groove, and applications that send messages rather than write files. Well, come to think of it, why not?