Artistic Data @EMCWorld

"Do you realize if it weren't for Edison we'd be watching TV by candlelight?" -Al Boliska

It is getting close once again to attend my company's annual technology conference called EMC World. Thousands of people will come together May 21st through the 24th at the Venetian Hotel and Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada. Yes, that very same place the Blue Man Group calls home.

In a weird way, the guys in the Blue Man Group look similar to the guy in our EMC World promo picture above. But they also look a little less freaky than the half wired man, half clouded bald guy. It probably isn't a good thing for me to be taking swipes at the advertising picture for EMC World 2012. But that picture makes me think about technology and where we are on the technology curve. While most everyone just flows with technology, I ride on top of it and believe we are on the upswing of even cooler stuff to come and it is this thing called "The Cloud."

I look back at what Bill Gates and Microsoft did for technology with their Windows Operating System. It gave the world greater access to technology in a more consistent and usable fashion. Yes, there were many...and I mean many...different companies and software options. With Microsoft, we were able to collectively do things together more easily and with greater productivity.

Some may argue that the dominance of Microsoft was bad, namely Steve Jobs and the folks at Apple. I contend that without Microsoft we would still be struggling to communicate between companies, between nations, and between people. There would have been fifty different word processing programs, eighty spreadsheet programs, a myriad of email programs and a lot of frustration. We had thousands of colors on an artist's pallette but no brush to make it all work together in one great painting.

A connected world by general adoption of a single operating system set up the path to where Apple would than lead us. With Steve Jobs at the helm of Apple, he worked all those many years to create a tightly controlled user experience that astounded millions of people. He created products that were elegant, in fact beautiful. Microsoft created the brush for us but we were still mechanical in nature, painting by numbers so to say. Apple products created an ability to bring human emotion and creativity into a blended mix with technology. They turned us into artists.

I was never a big Apple user early on because of my technology geekiness. I had a need to see what was inside and how it worked. That kind of geekiness has it's place in the technology craziness. Part of me could be pictured as the half wired guy in our EMC World picture. That is certainly part of who I am, always wanting to see the bits and bytes. Yet I do have a creative side, as all of us do. We could be engineers creatively designing a new product, a technical person creatively finding ways to diagnose and fix a product, or a business person coming up with new ways to sell or work with a new product. It really is not a whole lot different than painters, songwriters, singers or actors. We are all artists in one way or another.

What Microsoft and Apple did, including quite a few other companies, too many to mention, was to set the stage for an even greater collaboration of people, data and being connected. The technology advances we are going to see over the next couple of years will make video conferencing with friends in Curitiba, Brazil seem old school. Together we are going to see clarity in what the "cloud" can do for us.

I am excited because my company, EMC, is right smack-dab in the middle of it all. We play a very important role in this upswing on the technology curve. Along with all these other great companies, technology is becoming more about the connected nature of people as opposed to the technology itself. Billions of bytes of data out there in the world.

In a 2011 EMC-sponsored study, 1800 billion gigabytes (1.8 Zettabytes) were determined to be out there. If you look at just one zettabyte, it is the equivalent of the total storage capacity of 75 billion 16GB iPads, or all the information in all the academic libraries in the US (times half a million), or possibly the output of every inhabitant of the planet tweeting, non-stop, for a century. Lots and lots of data.

But never fear, it isn't some weird half android humanoid that we are going to become. It simply means that we will have the ability to be even more creative, more connected and more human in all of our connections to other people. We are going to see greater things happening in our lifetime. So stay tuned in, turned on and ride the wave of all that is happening.

See you @EMCWorld and I will blog each day I am there about the personal connections that are happening with people.

Stay inspired my friends.