Abstraction

When I look at evolution of new technologies, one commonality that attracted my attention was that they all strive towards abstraction. When it gets to solving a problem, we want the problem or rather the solution to escalate to a level where all the underlying levels are either already solved or taken care of by someone else. For example, a calculator is a fine example (may be a very shallow example..:)). When you use it, you implicitly assume that it is doing the right thing. You dont care about the algorithm or circuitry it uses. All you care about is that, it gives you the right result. And, a CEO or someone who gets the results from an accountant who uses the calculator probably doesnt want to know the sequence of calculations that were used as long as he gets his result and so on. For someone who is a benefactor of technology, it is a boon to not having to know all the underlying mechanism. But, for someone who develops the technology, is it true?

In life, the interesting stuff happens only during transitions. I think, managing transitions is what life is all about. Whenever people talk about anything, they
only talk about the first few minutes or hours or months or the last few... Anything that happens in between is either overlooked or not talked about...The reason why transitions are more exciting is probably because it is also the most vulnerable part. Anyway, that was a digression of my thought flow... What has this got to do with abstractions? When technology goes through transitions, things dont always look good. As abstractions are abstracted, they are unstable and some people almost always dont want everything to be abstracted since they lose a sense of control over what they do. So, technological transitions suffer this major hurdle as it paves it's way through.

One of the hot topics today in technology is virtualisation. Virtualisation of all kinds. In a nutshell, what businesses want to do is to give users an interface to manage stuff and everything else will be taken care of behind the scenes. For example, you dont really need to have a computer. You will have an interface that will emulate what you get out of a computer. You could ask for a computer with linux or microsoft OS with xyz applications and you will get it on demand. Your disk storage will be on demand. Your internet speed will be on demand. You will be given services which will make sure that your data is secure. You dont have to worry about software upgrades. You just pay for a single service... Abstraction of technology to a level where the user doesnt have to tinker around anything by themselves... If you are a "server hogger", you may not like this. If you are a sceptic about security, you might be concerned. But, this is the model that will be followed as technology progresses. You will hear terms like Virtual Machines, Virtual Platforms, Virtual I/Os and so on.

To me, virtualisation is just one facet of abstraction. The interesting thing about abstraction is that, businesses can capitalize on peak consumption or lack thereof. Look at airlines, they always try to oversell tickets with the assumption that not everybody who signed upto travel show up. Same is the case with internet bandwidth. You will be amazed at how much of oversubscription happens on a given link. Again, the same is true with computer utilization. How many of us use our computers to its maximum computational capacity. We all aspire for the fastest computer though..:) As technology gets abstracted to the next level, industries can make use of the inefficiencies in individual's usage so that more people think they have all the computational power they need... It is good for the consumer because they dont have to deal with installing new software or hardware which in some cases, might require a PhD even for the "skilled"... Though abstraction is fact of life, I still think there is a sort of vacuum that it leaves behind for the fresher aspirants...