Présentation prospective sur l'avenir du poste de travail informatique et du PC à travers les tendances technologiques et sociétales présentes et à venir.

1. Principales conclusions
■ Les tendances de l'informatique client ont changé le marché d'une focalisation
sur les ordinateurs personnels à une perspective plus large qui comprend
smartphones, les tablettes et d’autres appareils grand public.
■ Les services émergents du Cloud relient par le réseau des différents appareils
que les utilisateurs choisissent à différents moments de leur vie quotidienne.
■ L'ère du Cloud personnel marquera un changement de point d’équilibre des
appareils vers les services.
■ Les applications et les appareils deviennent plus simples à utiliser en premier
abord par les utilisateurs. Toute les interfaces avec une courbe d'apprentissage
forte resteront réservées aux experts et ne seront que difficilement acceptés
massivement.
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2. Dans la plupart des secteurs les organisations sont confrontées à des ruptures venant de
technologies émergentes, de l'environnement politique et légal, de modèles économiques
nouveaux ou encore de changements sociaux et culturels. La prospective stratégique et la
veille stratégique essaient d'identifier, d'anticiper et de gérer ces ruptures ainsi que de se
préparer à agir dans ce futur incertain.
Nous fournissons des ateliers, des présentations, des rapports et des méthodes permettant de
mieux cerner l'impact des changements de technologie et de société. Citons comme exemple le
domaine du e-Gouvernement avec des éléments tels que le Référentiel e-Société ou le rapport
Administration Demain.
Nous sommes aussi acteurs dans la stratégie des SI de l'État de Genève pour y apporter une
aide active dans la rédaction et l'animation, ainsi que des valeurs centrales comme: la technologie
au service de la société, l'ouverture vers les citoyens et les entreprises, l'information comme
ressource stratégique et la maîtrise des systèmes d'information. L'objectif étant bien entendu de
pouvoir tendre vers un écosystème d'information ouvert qui soit flexible, efficace et résilient.
Concepts clé:
•Veille sociétale et technologique
•Prospective stratégique
•Conseil stratégique à l'État de Genève au niveau des technologies, des métiers de
l'administration publique et du changement de société
•Partenariat actif avec des organisations internes, para-étatiques externes et internationales
•Journée de rencontre: Réseaux de personnes et d'objets, Villes numériques, Données publiques
ouvertes, Innovation dans le service public, Confiance à l'ère du numérique, etc.
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4. L'évolution de l'informatique et des systèmes d'information se relit à travers des
grandes époques relativement rapides d'environ 10 ans. Les systèmes de chaque
époque connaissent de acteurs dominants qui innovent et provoquent généralement
le basculement vers un nouveau paradigme. Les nouvelles technologies ne balayent
pas de façon drastique celles préexistantes, mais celles-ci se stratifient. Ces
nouvelles technologies sont souvent en rupture par rapport aux précédentes et les
sous-tendent aussi parfois.
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8. Les géants deviennent minuscules.
Suspects: microprocesseur, ordinateur quantique.
Disque dur, Processeur, Mémoire (Gordon Moore)
Les grand ordinateurs mastodontes nés au milieu du 20e siècle on vu leur taille
se réduire jusqu'à devenir invisibles à l'œil humain tandis que leurs
performances, leur mémoire, leur vitesse ne cessaient de croître de manière
exponentielle.
UNIVAC (1952) – 13 tons – 5200 Vaccuum tubes – 1000 word of 12 characters –
2000 operations per second 2.25 MHz clock
IBM PC XT (1983) 128 KB Mem – 360 KB Floppy disk 5 ¼ in – 10 MB Hard disk
– Intel 8088 4.77 Mhz (8087 math co-proc)
FXI Cotton Candy (2012) – Packed inside its tiny little frame is a 1GHz ARM
Cortex-A9 processor built by Samsung, along with an ARM Mali-400 GPU. It also
packs HDMI-out, WiFi and a Micro USB port— and comes with Android or
Ubuntu pre-loaded as the OS. It also handles MPEG-4 and H.264 video formats,
so you could plug it into a TV and use it as a rudimentary media PC.
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9. L'ordinateur se dérobe.
Suspect: informatique ubiquitaire.
Design (Steve Jobs)
Peu à peu l'ordinateur se cache. Devenu esthétique grâce au soin apporté à son
design, il se fond dans le décor. Il se dissimule dans les objets de tous les jours
et dans l'environnement domestique. Il devient calculatrice, machine à écrire,
téléphone portable, télévision.
Exemples: Roomba iRobot, Nabaztag, Nabaztag/tag, Karotz
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10. L'informatique n'est plus qu'un souvenir.
Oubli: Réalité augmentée, GPS, Immersion
Les progrès en informatique graphique ont ouvert la voie à d'autres dimensions
plongeant l'utilisateur dans des mondes imaginaire et symboliques. Aujourd'hui
les techniques de communication mettent en relation quasi physique les
correspondants éloignés faisant oublier comment s'opère ce miracle. Le mélange
entre réalité et éléments fictifs achève de brouiller les pistes.
Suspects: réalité virtuelle et réalité augmentée.
Exemples: Layar, Tango, SixthSense, WordLens, Google Earth, ConditionONE
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11. L'informatique se dématérialise.
Internet, Web, Cloud (Vint Cerf, Tim Berners Lee) – l’informatique se
dématérialise.
Les premiers ordinateurs ont été reliés à des terminaux, eux-mêmes bientôt
remplacés par des micro-ordinateurs. Ces derniers ont été connectés entre eux
par des réseaux, puis par des réseaux de réseaux. Tel un morceau de sucre qui
se dissout dans une tasse de thé, l'ordinateur se dématérialise dans un nuage
informatique.
Suspect: Internet.
Exemples: Computer lab 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010
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12. L'ordinateur se prend pour l'homme.
Principaux suspects: intelligence artificielle, hybridation homme machine.
Intuitivité, Simplicité, Interface, Intelligence artificielle (Joseph Weizenbaum –>
Judea Pearl)
L'homme commence par dialoguer avec l'ordinateur par le biais de langages de
plus en plus évolués. Plus tard la machine reconnaît sa voix et la synthétise. Puis
elle interagit avec l'homme par l'intermédiaire d'interfaces et accroît ses
perceptions par le biais d'implants. Désormais elle rivalise avec l'intelligence
humaine.
Exemples: Doug Engelbart (1968), Xerox Alto (1973), Deep Blue v Kasparov
(1997), IBM Watson (2011) , Asimo (2000), Microsoft Clippy (1998), Wolfram
Alpha (2009), Apple Siri (2011)
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15. IBM a annoncé Blue Cloud, un service basé sur Linux, Hadoop, Xen et PowerVM. RightScale
et 3Tera offrent des outils d'administration pour gérer facilement des machines basées dans
des centres de calculs différents; opsource offre également un service similaire.
Google App Engine a été présenté en avril 2008 et permet à des applications web en Python
d'être déployées sur l'infrastructure de Google.
Microsoft a annoncé récemment Windows Azure et Azure Services Platform, une offre
similaire d'infrastructure de Cloud Computing.
Rackspace propose aussi une plateforme de Cloud computing sous la marque Mosso, qui
inclut Cloud Sites, Cloud Files et Cloud Servers tandis que ServePath fait de même sous la
marque GoGrid.
Des compagnies comme RightScale fournissent un interface pour gérer et accéder plus
simplement la plateforme de Cloud Computing de Amazon Web Services.
Five Refining Attributes of Public and Private Cloud Computing, Gartner, ID:G00167182, 5
May 2009. http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1035013
The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing, Recommendations of the National Institute
of Standards and Technology, Peter Mell, Timothy Grance, Special Publication (800-145),
September 2011. http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/PubsSPs.html#800-145
Stratégie Cloud Computing des autorités suisses, Version pour consultation, USIC, 14
novembre 2011. http://www.isb.admin.ch/themen/strategien/00071/01452/index.html?lang=fr
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16. D’après le National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) les caractéristiques
principales de ce type de service sont qu’il est (1) à la demande, (2) accessible depuis le
réseau, (3) concentrateur de ressources, (4) grandement élastique, (5) offre un service
mesuré. Dans ce contexte, trois types des services sont proposés (1) Software as a Service
(SaaS), (2) Platform as a Service (PaaS) et (3) Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Les
modèles de déploiement peuvent être publics, privés, réservés à une communauté ou
hybrides. Voir le site NIST Cloud Computing http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/cloud-
computing/index.html
Plusieurs solutions sont offertes par les fournisseurs comme Google, Amazon, IBM ou
Microsoft, mais certaines solutions open source permettent aussi d’expérimenter l’usage de
Clouds privés comme par exemple Eucalyptus utilisé notamment par la NASA sur Nebula.
D’autres offres sont certainement en préparation dans ce domaine.
http://open.eucalyptus.com/wiki/Documentation
http://nebula.nasa.gov/about/
Le sujet du Cloud Computing est largement couvert par les médias, les fournisseurs et les
consultances et se trouve au sommet des attentes exagérées d’après Gartner. Toutefois
l’avancement de cette technologie semble rapide car sa phase de maturité sera atteinte dans
2 à 5 ans.
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19. The Mobility Shift — Wherever and Whenever You Want
The march of computing and communications over time has been governed by a series of so-called laws.
Moore's Law and Metcalfe's Law have led to the mobile environment we have today. One important result
has been the race to ever smaller, more portable and power-efficient electronic devices. What filled a
desktop a decade ago now fits in your pocket — only with much more capability. This plays on another
truism — people like to move around. Users don't want technology dictating where and when they can
access information, talk to someone or play a game. They want it whenever and wherever they happen to
be.
The reality is that many of the traditional form factors for computing simply do not lend themselves to these
kinds of computing needs. In the past, we made excuses about tradeoffs in processing power or weight, but
today mobile devices combined with the cloud can fulfill most computing tasks, and any tradeoffs are
outweighed in the minds of the user by the convenience and flexibility provided by the mobile devices.
One area where smaller has not always been better has been in user interaction.
Small devices mean small buttons and difficult-to-use interfaces. While keyboards and mice have been
essential to bringing computing to the masses, they now serve to hold back computing by tying us to our
desks. However, the emergence of more natural user interface experiences is making mobility practical.
Touch- and gesture-based user experiences, coupled with speech and contextual awareness, are enabling
rich interaction with devices and a much greater level of freedom. The addition of sensors is making the
devices richer platforms for applications, and is enabling locationspecific or context-specific operation.
While mobile devices aren't killing the PC, they are shifting the focus for developers and users. Mobility
raises new concerns about security.
While, technically, "companion" is a great term for these newer devices, the term has been imbued with a
connation that the devices "need" the PC to be truly useful. This is certainly not the case at all. These
systems are fully useful on their own. They do not require using a PC to sync with user data (stored in the
cloud) or complete any transaction. These devices are full peers. At any point in time, and depending on the
scenario, any given device will take on the role of the user's primary device — the one at the center of the
user's constellation of devices.
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25. "App-ification" — From Applications to Apps
The Apple App Store was the first app distribution service which set the standard and continues to do so for the other
app distribution services, it opened on July 10, 2008, and as of January 2011, reported over 10 billion downloads. Until
June 6, 2011, there are 425,000 third-party apps available, which are downloaded by 200 million iOS users. During
Apple's 2012 Worldwide Developer's Conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that the App Store has 650,000
available apps to download as well as "an astounding 30 billion apps" downloaded from the app store until that date.
The ultimate goal of all IT is to deliver some service or application to a user. Users run applications, not operating
systems or even devices — those are just a means to an end. When the way that applications are designed, delivered
and consumed by users changes, it has a dramatic impact on all other aspects of the market. There is an application
metamorphosis under way:
■ Changing packaging — Bite-sized, narrowly focused chunks rather than large, all encompassing systems. We will
always need big applications for certain things, but increasingly small, cost-effective targeted applets will cover many
users' needs and provide more flexibility.
■ Changing price model — Users have come to expect software at much lower prices, even free. App stores have
become the equivalent of the dollar store, offering low-cost goods of acceptable quality to those who just need to get a
task done.
■ Changing delivery models — Today, the vast majority of user-facing application development is Web based.
Microsoft's new Metro-style applications for Windows 8 will be Web based and
will use HTML5, JavaScript and CSS. Even when applications are not totally Web-based, they often leverage these
cross-platform tools to provide a wider audience.
These changes will have a profound impact on how applications are written and managed in corporate environments.
They also raise the prospect of greater cross-platform portability as small user experience (UX) apps are used to adjust a
server- or cloud-resident application to the unique characteristics of a specific device or scenario. One application can
now be exposed in multiple ways and used in varying situations by the user.
On the downside, there is the real possibility of incompatibility between tools as various users select different apps to do
similar functions and discover they can't effectively share data. Of course, there is also the ever-present specter of
security issues as applications move and store corporate data in potentially unknown locations hosted by organizations
of unknown stability or means. Companies will have to get ahead of these issues or spend the next decade unraveling
the problems that will crop up.
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32. Eric Schmidt (PDG Google): "Every 2 Days We Create As Much Information As
We Did Up To 2003"
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37. Consumerization — You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet
■ Users are more technologically savvy and have very different expectations of technology. Users may not
understand the details of how technology works, but they certainly understand what technology can do.
■ Internet and social media have empowered and emboldened users. Today, consumers provide instant
feedback on what they like to anyone who happens to be listening. They no longer rely on just a small group
of specialist intermediaries to tell them what and how things are, but rather can chose their own unique set
of information channels.
■ The rise of powerful, affordable mobile devices changes the equation for users. They now have the
technology in their hands — devices that are truly portable and powerful enough to do real work. However,
to appeal to the consumerist masses and get the kind of broad adoption they need, vendors have been
forced to simplify how these devices work.
■ Users have become innovators. New devices and applications have become the basic building blocks of
a new wave of innovation. Users are familiar with discovering a new gadget and turning it into a tool —
sometimes playful, sometimes useful. Corporate data is making its way onto devices and into applications
dictated by users, and there may be no way to stop it. Consumerization is leading to a whole new wave of
unexpected consequences.
■ The democratization of technology, as users of all types and status within organizations can now have
similar technology available to them. Organizations that today rely on high-end concierge services for senior
executives are being forced to expand those services to all users and, therefore, must rethink how to
support this managed diversity.
Not all aspects of consumerization are positive when viewed through a corporate lens. Users aren't very
good at dealing with the details of keeping technology working and secure. They are easily frustrated when
something breaks or is difficult to use, and they don't like when something they want to use doesn't live up to
their expectations. Consumers are also easily swayed by style and fads, rather than function, and this can
lead to disappointment. What's hot today may be forgotten tomorrow. While this may be fine for individuals,
this could prove devastatingly expensive for enterprises. Furthermore, it reinforces a culture in which
manufacturers are more interested in selling the next device than supporting the last one, resulting in a
continual churn of features and capabilities. This makes it tough for IT planners to build around specific
devices with any level of confidence. Further, supporting and optimizing around the churn adds cost and
complexity to nearly every IT function.
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38. This new personal cloud supports the characteristics demanded by users, such as:
■ Being highly mobile.
■ Being always available.
■ Being user directed — the user is in control of what he or she uses, how he or she uses it, and what he or
she shares with others.
■ Embracing multiple experiences and device classes — the device becomes secondary to the service:
■ The user can switch between devices based on situation and need.
■ No device can be considered essential all the time.
■ Providing rich interactions and content.
■ Providing a seamless shift between computing and communicating.
■ Supporting both private and public clouds, thus providing resources when a user needs it, not when IT
can get around to delivering it. The personal cloud will be a federated blending of different services and
cloud offerings, presented to the user as a single environment.
■ Providing contextual awareness to deliver the services and content to users that are appropriate to their
situation or immediate needs, rather than overwhelming them.
■ Providing operationally obvious computing — no training required:
■ Well-designed, straightforward UXs are respected and craved by users.
■ Simple, task-focused, bite-sized applets.
■ The learning curve is dead. If it takes training, it will be relegated to the specialists and
not be broadly adopted.
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39. Recommendations for Enterprises
Faced with these major changes, enterprises must take the following steps to ensure they are not caught
off-guard as user expectations and demands shift:
■ Stop building for physical environments — Select techniques and designs that will support multiple
operating environments. This includes developing expertise with desktop virtualization technologies, but
extends to application design and operations. Ensure that user-focused operations embrace the concept of
managed diversity (see "Use Managed Diversity to Support the Growing Variety of Endpoint Devices").
■ Get ahead of the curve on "bring your own devices" (BYODs) — Users will increasingly be using devices
not provided by the enterprise to assist them in their daily work. Catching up to and, ultimately, getting
ahead of the users in this area is critical if IT is to provide any leadership in the user area. Companies need
to establish a BYOD program, including policies and processes (see "Gartner's View on 'Bring Your Own' in
Client Computing").
■ Embrace a self-service culture for users — Where possible, enable users to make their own decisions
about technology in order to gain a higher level of self-sufficiency without the need for unnecessary hand-
holding by IT personnel. Where it isn't possible, work to make it possible. While the IT organization will
always play a role in directing users, providing them guidance and assistance with technology decisions,
users are increasingly capable of dealing with many dayto-day needs on their own.
■ Look for ways to abstract and secure applications and data, not devices (see "How Will Users Access the
PC Apps They Need on Their Alternative Devices?").
■ Move corporate resources to a secure cloud — A move to a secure corporate cloud (either internally
managed or leveraging public cloud services) makes applications and services available to users across the
organization and from multiple locations and devices. This doesn't mean a free-for-all approach to corporate
data or services. Restrictions will always be necessary for certain types of sensitive data. For example,
access to customer credit card or patient data must be tightly controlled.
■ Adopt browser-based applications with local assistance — the "app" model. While not every app lends
itself to decomposition into smaller chunks or delivery through the browser, companies need to get away
from device-dependent, locally-installed applications. At the same time, companies should look for new
delivery techniques to ease the burden of administration (for example, moving away from application
installation by using App-V or other techniques to eliminate the need to store or manage devices).
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