EMCWorld - Its The People

"Technology is nothing. What's important is that you have a faith in people, that they're basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they'll do wonderful things with them." -Steve Jobs

I will be changing it up a little bit this week as I write from Las Vegas, Nevada. This is the week of EMC World in which 13,000 technology professionals come together to experience, learn and share in the world of data, cloud technology and so much more. If you combine them with the nearly 2000 EMC people working the show, you can start to see it is a pretty large gathering.

If you want to read regular updates, check out the event via Twitter by following @EMCWorld and other sites that offer updates and live feeds from the event.

With so much technology on display, I thought it important to reflect upon the human side of it. Technology in the form of computers, data storage systems, software, smart devices, etc., all have and continue to transform our lives. No longer do we require large file cabinets to store thousand if not millions of hardcopy pages. No longer do we require large paper road atlas maps to get around. No longer do we require a longer phone cord to talk on the phone further away from the kitchen wall. I could go on and on and on with the advances that technology provides us.

In fact I would venture to say that technology and the advances are really kind of boring. We know that data is growing by a factor of 100x every ten years. We know that CPU speeds are getting faster every year. We know that disk drive technology is transforming itself as seen by the adoption of flash drive technology. So it is becoming less exciting to see the new technology and more exciting to see what people are doing with that technology.

Artistic Data

I wrote about this in a recent article titled Artistic Data @EMCWorld in which the excitement now comes from the blending of this technology with human innovation. You can tell from the quote I chose for today that I really believe the transformation is beginning to happen.

If you read the article above, you will further understand what I mean. But the transformation that am talking about is similar to how cars transformed everything we did. The car opened up first as a means to move from one place to another but the horse and cart still moved goods from one place to another. The car changed into trucks and became faster, more reliable. The car expanded our reach, no longer confining us to a radius of 15 or 20 miles in one day by horse. People could now travel to Yosemite, or California, relatives no longer lived down the street or in the next county. The world became a little smaller, more accessible.

Technology has done the same thing. We no longer need a phone on the kitchen wall. We can be driving down the road talking to someone. We can take a picture of the great ball of twine in Kansas and send it to friends back in Atlanta. Also, think about how many people now work from home. No longer do we need to sit in an office, in a cubicle in order to work and accomplish our job tasks.

So much technology, it is almost boring at times. What isn't boring though are the cool uses for those technologies that PEOPLE are coming up with. And I meant that to be in capital letters. How are PEOPLE going to start blending it all into something beautiful, functional and of course, useful.

So when we start talking about all of that data, of which EMC will be in the middle of it all, we must not forget that it is the PEOPLE that will do wonderful things with it. PEOPLE will be the reason for all of the advances, of all the great things that will be done.

Enjoy the week folks and let's do something cool and wonderful for all of us.

And above all, stay inspired my friends.