Welcome to Smuggle Me

This past week I’ve been attending a conference called Educause 2006 in Dallas. The first general session speaker was Vinton G. Cerf the Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. I must admit that when I saw that someone from Google was planning on speaking at the conference I was quite excited.

Well, I must admit that overall I was quite disappointed by the experience. I would have expected more. Yes, I do have a high standard.

Despite my personal distaste for his speech, he did say one thing that I found very interesting and enlightening.

He talked about how it is necessary for us to think about not only the data that we are storing, but also how we are going to be able to view that data as technology evolves. Sure, that’s nothing new. He gave a nice example of how we would be able to read a Powerpoint 2003 file with Powerpoint 3003 software. I don’t think backwards compatibility is going to last that far out.

His solution was something I hadn’t realized. He suggested that web applications need to be created to read this old file types. How simple is that? No wonder Google has such a thrust in making web applications. Google will be a very serious player if down the road, they are the ones that own the web applications that are able to read these archived files. Pretty neat.

The sad part is that Microsot amongst others are probably not as interested in making their applications easily readable in some web format. Why would they be interested? That cuts into their bottom line. It should be really interesting to see how this evolves over time.