The era of the PHPC

Due to space constraints, my review last week of the Power Mac G5 and OS X 10.3 (Panther) neglected to mention my use of Apple’s Final Cut Pro as a key to understanding the G5’s technology, and why anyone in business would need that much firepower on their desk.

Because of my background as a media producer, I feel video production and Final cut Pro are handy devices for explaining the relevance of the Power Mac G5 and Panther to IT. I encourage you to take my metaphor and replace it with your own. I had a front-row seat to the evolution of video production technology, which followed a beneficially disruptive course. I’m seeing the same trends in computing.

In professional video, the producer is never under more pressure than when the customer is in the room. The customer has ideas about what the finished work should look like, and those ideas are not bound by the limits of the producer’s skills or available technology. He expects to walk through the door with a new tape and not hear the producer voice objections. The customer expects to be able to iChat the producer, describe some last-minute changes, and watch via streaming video as the changes are applied.

The customer shouldn’t be forced to fit his vision into the limits of technology. He shouldn’t be expected to think like a video producer or care whether or not his requirements are convenient. When the customer is forced to understand the technology well enough to grasp what he cannot do, creativity all but vanishes. That’s an expensive sacrifice for all involved.

To succeed in her field, a producer needs the freedom to experiment, to shape a vision through painless trial and error. Her world changed when she could move through multilayered content in real time or faster, pull whole projects into other projects, and borrow sequences from other producers while effortlessly adding her own touch.

I love this metaphor because it encapsulates the idea of profitable creativity, and it maps directly to technology. Unleashing the creativity of the producer requires a computer, or cluster of computers, that manages more content, even terabytes of it, than one could fit on a high-definition TV. It races and corners and reverses course as fast as the producer’s mind does. I refer to the technology capable of such feats personal high-performance computers. PHPCs will make changes well beyond the realm of media, but media remains a good metaphor. Imagine what television will be, what film will be, when a whole generation of students has never seen “Now rendering, please wait.”

Imagine how logistics, retailing, and health care will change when data travels in streams instead of batches, and when computers are able to structure, combine, analyze, and alter data without traditional technological limits. If you think that’s merely a pipe dream, watch a video producer build a complex project in Final Cut Pro on a Power Mac G5, or watch a music producer manipulate a 64-track mix that treats live, recorded, and synthesized audio the same way.

Look beyond the apparent relevance of my chosen metaphors; find your own. Look beyond my appreciation of the Mac as well. Great things are coming.