“Technology does not drive change. Technology enables change. It is our collective cultural response to the options and opportunities presented by technology that drives change.”

- Paul Saffo

To simply state that change in IT is inevitable is a pedestrian understatement. Information technology is changing more rapidly than ever before. It seems that hardware and software, and practical application techniques undergo seismic changes every year, bringing a new wave of applications as well as cultural and anthropological implications that were not conceivable a year before.

Our old model of enterprise and small business computing which has workstations married to desks, servers in the back room, and mass storage attached locally is dead. If this model is the basis of your ongoing information technology architecture, fire your IT person because you are beating an anachronistic horse, particularly if that horse is named Microsoft Windows.

This old model is quickly succumbing to the new paradigm of intelligent, cheap, portable devices in the hands of agile creative workers, with applications and storage provided by standards based services from the cloud. It is time to get over the nephophobia and realize that the bulk of your data services will be moving away from your physical location and that the primary activity of your IT department will be the deployment and management of mobile devices. Your infrastructure will be “SaaS,” meaning both Storage as a Service and Software as a Service.

If you are tasked with watching changes in the IT landscape and you don’t live under the proverbial rock, then you should be aware that cataclysmic change has been brought about by two “Extinction Level Events.”

The first ELE was the introduction of the iPhone which all but caused the extinction of the mobile phone as we knew it. The iPhone is a handheld computer that happens to have a phone attached. The iPhone forever changed the way mobile phones look and behave. The iPhone lifted our expectations of handheld mobile devices far beyond where they were just a day before the iPhone was introduced.

The second ELE was of course the advent of the iPad. The iPad in just 11 months sold over 15 million units and people became accustomed to the idea that they no longer needed the big desktop or heavy laptop to get work done. Initially written off by those who continue to try and milk the dead cow (Windows), the iPad has been a phenomenal success and you will be hard pressed to find a major institution that is not experimenting with new ways to incorporate the iPad.

And of course the halo effect is bringing the Macintosh itself in significant numbers to corporate America. People are realizing the true advantage of the Macintosh is Mac OS X. Mac OS X is quite possibly the most sophisticated general purpose operating system currently available. It is an industrial strength operating system that excels in speed, usability, and security. It is the foundation technology of a truly remarkable trinity; iPhone, iPad, and Mac OS X. iOS, the operating system that powers iPhone, iPad, and iPod for that matter, is a Mac OS X derivative, proving that Mac OS X is not only versatile, but highly scalable.

If the effect of iPhone and iPad are still not apparent to you, its understandable. After the great meteor hit, the surviving dinosaurs weren’t initially impressed by the little mammals running around either. If that analogy doesn’t make it clear how significant the changes are, let me put it to you this way. Welcome to the Post-Windows Era.

The idea that we are at the end of the Windows hegemony is not an easy one for many people to grasp. This does not mean that Windows will disappear over night. Windows has been so massively successful that it will linger for the foreseeable future. It is still on the vast majority of computers in the world. Nonetheless, we are at the end of the Cretaceous period as far as Windows is concerned. IT is undergoing its own climate change and the biggest dinosaurs are bellowing from their respective tar pits.

HP Executive Stephen DeWitt droned on recently about Apple not providing a more inclusive channel system for VARs etc. In other words, this gentleman is saying Apple fails because they don’t create enough middlemen to add cost and complexity to acquiring products.

Andy Lark, DELL’s Global Head of Marketing for Large Enterprises and Public Organizations (that all has to fit on his business card I guess), made it clear that he is completely in the dark with regard to the global success of the iPad. This visionary stated that Android is outpacing it. Seriously? There are over 65,000 applications built specifically for the iPad, not to mention that most of the 350,000 titles on Apple’s app store will function on iPad, while there are only 17 apps for Android/Honeycomb tablets. Lark even referred to the iPad as “complex.” To further underscore his dinosaur status, Lark literally said that an iPad with a keyboard, mouse and case is $1500 or $1600. Keyboard? Mouse? $1500? With this vise-like grasp of reality and nimble analysis, is it any wonder Dell has floundered and been outpaced by Apple for years? Lark considers Dell’s stake in Microsoft Windows a strength. The article is worth a read for a good chuckle. Dell has a bright future as an also-ran.

Microsoft’s Global Chief of Research and Strategy, Craig Mundie, recently stated that he did not know whether the new category of tablet computers, in particular the iPad, was here to stay. This he said while (as the author of the article put it) “…virtually the entire consumer electronics industry throws its weight behind tablet computers…” The reason that Microsoft stock has been stale forever is clear. Microsoft has never innovated. They got lucky once when Gates leased DOS to IBM. DOS was a clone they bought. Windows was a copy of the original Macintosh. The success of Windows should count as the world’s largest industrial accident. Even now, reading the comments of Mundie, it’s clear that there is a kind of delusional groupthink at Redmond these days. They don’t know they’re beaten. They don’t know they’re the dinosaurs. They’re still practicing their old business model of copy and claim innovation.

Obviously some will cling tenaciously to the status quo but this won’t change the fact that this is the post-Windows era.

Going forward, Windows will no longer be the foundation upon which enterprise solutions are built. It will no longer be important for businesses to be compatible with Microsoft Windows. Due to cloud based services, organizations and individuals will have choices. In fact, it will become more important for Windows itself to maintain compatibility with the standards of the world. Microsoft won’t be able to simply subvert standards via its embrace and corrupt methodology. You can’t embrace a cloud.

As the older IT people die out, or get replaced due to lack of vision and imagination, IT departments will stop marching in lockstep to build Redmond specified, blessed, and proprietary solutions. The cloud is OS agnostic.

Instead of Windows compatibility, issues like app availability and user experience will become important. If your company is using Salesforce.com for CRM, browser compatibility is important. App availability is important. Windows is utterly irrelevant. Even when organizations find it necessary to build their own solutions, they will build cloud based services hosted by cloud hosting companies with mobile devices as the targeted delivery platform.

Did the iPad bring all of this about? No. Not exactly. The iPad is however, the first truly successful and visible harbinger of these changes. We have been inching toward the “cloud” for many years now, and the iPhone as well as the iPad are the most exciting “cloud clients” to come about. See “Padding the Cloud.” The iPad seems built from the ground up to take advantage of cloud computing.

Enterprise IT architecture won’t be the only area of change brought about by the cloud and clients like the iPad. In the post-Windows-era, expect to see the ultimate collapse of the “workplace.” The concept of “going to work” is dissipating into the cloud. Already it makes little sense for employees to get up and drive an average of 45 minutes to an office, just to send the same email messages they could have sent from home. Internet ubiquity is growing. In the post-Windows-era, the workplace will become anywhere there is good wireless broadband. With faster connections and cloud services, expect the workplace to become largely virtual. Small to medium sized organizations will be completely virtual. Very large enterprises will have large numbers of virtual employees operating in the cloud.

The post-Windows-era promises to be an exciting time as we break free from the stale Windows stranglehold on businesses. There are new dangers though that make the Windows monopoly look pale in comparison. Most notably there is the danger of tier one ISPs essentially taking ownership of the Internet. While we are poised to take advantage of a new connected world in the post-Windows-era, tier one ISPs are exploring ways to cap, meter, throttle, and artificially limit bandwidth. We must work together to insure that the Internet remains neutral. Net Neutrality is one of the most important aspects of the post-Windows-era. Let your congressional representatives, i.e. YOUR employees know that if they hand the Internet over to a few corporations, they will be out of work.

The iPad and iPhone are not just best of breed devices, they define the breed. In the post-Windows-era we are making the Net smarter than ever as the devices we deploy have more and more sensory capability. iPads and iPhones and iPods, etc. can see and hear and determine where they are in the world. Consider for a moment what all that sensory data turns the Internet into. I don’t believe we have the vocabulary to express it yet.

On the one hand we have these new devices that can see, hear, locate themselves on a map, respond to touch and movement, provide access to cloud services, and on the other we have organizations looking for ways to claim ownership of the cloud. This cannot be allowed to happen. Microsoft may not be able to seize the cloud, but Time Warner and AT&T can.

In the post-Windows-era, information wants to flow freely. Without Net Neutrality the tier one ISPs will be free to charge for every bit that flows across their wires. If that happens we might as well forget it, stay chained to our desks, and keep installing Windows security patches.