Rounding out the second day was Eric Schmidt, chairman and CEO of Google, who told the audience that he has always had tremendous respect for the underlying architecture and technology approach at IBM.
"So, one day, Sam [Palmisano] called me and said, 'we'd like your thoughts about distributed computing,'" Schmidt said. "And I said, 'Well, I think this, and this, and this,' and—well, Sam is a pretty nice guy, and he said, 'We've already done this.' And all of a sudden, I realized, these guys are ahead of the game. They've actually thought through the consequences of this new life that we're building."
IT continues to develop at a fast pace, Schmidt said. He cited Moore's Law, which states that processor performance doubles every 18 months, and Kryder's Law, which states that hard drive capacity doubles every 12 months.
Such speed has allowed IT to scale, sometimes to the point where it is more than can be used. "By 2020, you could have a device with 85 years worth of video stored in it," Schmidt said. "But before you watch it all, you'll be dead."
Instead, businesses have to find ways to scale IT to the needs of customers, Schmidt said.
"IT is very globalized, with each geographic area imparting its own culture on how it uses IT," he said. "For instance, during the current worldwide rice shortage, one way rice farmers in places like Thailand use IT is to get on their cell phones to find out the best place to sell their rice to cut out the middleman. And fishermen in Southeast Asia use cell phones to find out which harbor is offering the best prices for their fish."
