HS058: Are We Pausing The Technology Cycle?

Today we debate its technoloyg is reaching a stable phase. Greg argues that we are in a period of stability, citing resistance to change and a slowdown in advancements. Johna believes that the rise of quantum computing and AI will lead to significant disruptions. They also discuss the future of AI and quantum computing, with Johna predicting a transformative impact by 2026, while Greg suggests a slower adoption due to existing heavy investments in technology. Transcript Johna (00:00:00) – Welcome to Heavy Strategy. This is a show that focuses on trying to determine the right questions, not giving you the right answers. Greg and I are going to talk today about a question that many of you might be asking yourselves, which is from a technology perspective, are we in a position of change or stability? I think you’ll see that Greg and I have very different perspectives on this, and we certainly welcome yours. Before we jump into it, please, just another reminder that we love to get feedback from you. Follow up. So please go ahead and hit Packet Pushers Net. Click on follow up for you and send us your send us your question, your thoughts and if you are interested in being on the show, let us know that as well. We are not interested in any of your private information, so you don’t have to leave your name or your email address or any of that. Just let us know your thoughts and let us know if you’d like to be on the show and how to contact you if so. Johna (00:00:51) – So with that, Greg, you have a pretty strong perspective or a strongly held perspective. I think I should say that we’re pretty much in a period of stability when it comes to technology. Can you elaborate? Greg (00:01:06) – When we look back, say, at the period around, say, 1999, 2000, we went through a very dynamic period of innovation, like genuine innovation, where entire programming languages were obsoleted, like things like Perl passed into, you know, not not history, but stop being the future. We saw x86 CPUs dominate and begin to iterate by somewhere in the mid 2000, though, the speed boosts flattened out, storage stopped getting larger at exponential rates and started to grow in linear rates more or less. We saw networking stabilized to sort of 100 Meg and then a gigabit, and then basically stagnate right the way up until, you know, okay, you could argue sort of 2012, 2014, 2015, when what we saw was the rise of software operations, and there was a massive transition in the way that we worked and we could call it DevOps, you could call it cloud, you could call it a whole range of things. Greg (00:02:05) – And that period of transition or change was matched with changes in the CPU. So CPUs went from being single cores running very hot, very fast. So clock rates reached the end. You know, the clock rate of a CPU reached its end. Now we have CPUs coming out with 6428, 256 cores on board. There’s a transition there in architecture, not so much in underlying performance. In networking, we saw the transition from one gig to ten gig to 25 gig to 100 gig in storage. We saw the transition from spinning rust to SSDs and now NVMe and so forth, and somewhere I think in the last two years, we’ve seen a position where customers are saying or the market is now saying, okay, we’ve just we’ve got enough. I’m not willing to embrace any more change. And there’s been this dramatic period of growth. And I think that the stagnation actually started just before Covid came in, and then Covid came along and it became or technology or the use of technology to change businesses during the Covid period created a sort of a false period or a false dawn that in another innovation cycle was starting. Greg (00:03:18) – And then I think what we’ve seen today is no, there is no next generation, because if you look back over time,