5 February 2009

Your Letters

Another take on the top 5

Here are my views of the top 5 technology and market trends for the coming year (in response to InTech e-Weekly's Pinto’s Point, 29 January, www.isa.org/link/0129_PP).

Industrial wireless: The problem with wireless is that it’s really still a beta type product. I would trust it for small scale things but would be real nervous about anything beyond that. Most people are going to not want to take a big chance that could come back to bite them. I also do not buy the overly optimistic view of these devices the manufacturers have. There is a lot of money to be saved, but I am not real convinced that the product sitting out there today is going to be usable 10 years from now in the communications environment that will exist then. The frequency spectrum only has so much bandwidth, and what little bandwidth has been allocated to these things does not seem like near enough to me.

Machine-to-machine (M2M) communications: Don’t buy it. Sounds good, but I just don’t see it coming about this year. Machines will need to talk to each other, but the standards for doing so in a meaningful way just don’t exist yet.

Security services: Yep. Muslim terrorists are not going to just go away. They will continue to attack weak points in our society, and industrial communications are a weak point.

Complex adaptive systems: Not this year. This kind of thing has been on the horizon for 30 years and has yet to make a dent anywhere yet.

Disappearing software: Maybe here and there. I do see a lot of configuration type programs embedded in products that are accessed via web browsers. But much beyond that, probably not.

Robert Peterson