In an attempt to broaden the awareness and appeal of it’s Jazz collaboration software, IBM is considering putting parts of it open source, although one source claims not the parts that really matter. It’s really hard to build a following around a closed platform these days as CNET’s Matt Asay points out.

… another step along the way to a desktop manufacturing revolution

Software used in today’s conventional milling machines is helping nanotech researchers make progress in nanomanufacturing:

The new technique suggests that the nanotechnology factories of the future might not operate so differently from existing manufacturing plants.

“If you can take prototyping and nanomanufacturing to a level that leverages what engineers know how to do, then you are ahead of the game,” Clark said. “Most engineers with conventional training don’t think about nanoscale manipulation. But if you want to leverage a workforce that’s already in place, how do you set up the future of manufacturing in a language that engineers already use to communicate? That’s what we’re focused on doing here.”

Duke News: Automation of Nanotech Manufacturing May Be Ahead

This should prove to be very helpful because there’s no getting around the strange and often counter-intuitive aspects of the nanoscale realm where thermal and quantum fluctuations make moving molecules from place to place like walking in a hurricane. Similar to the proven patterns used in software virtual machines, the Duke researchers are abstracting out the unfamiliar/counter-intuitive and substituting the more familiar. This is yet another sign of dematerialization and virtualization so I expect it will bear fruit.

In a nutshell, “rapid manufacturing” is poised for an unprecedented explosion of growth in the next 3 to 5 years. To see why this potential exists, it’s necessary to examine a broad set of shaping factors. If only a single segment is explored, significant growth looks to be much further out but when one takes into account the converging sources of influences and innovation at work, a different perspective emerges. in this regard it is helpful to examine some other patterns of technology evolution.
Initially PC’s were no match for mainframes when it came to raw processing power, but their accessibility(price and learning curve) enabled people to do things they simply couldn’t do before. In the process, people pushed the limits of PC’s and accelerated the demand for reducing their limits. They also at the same transformed the design and operation of mainframes - Linux and Java are significant contributors to renewed interest in mainframes. During the early days of PC’s many people didn’t see the potential for rapid growth because PC database programs could only manage a fraction of the data that mainframes did. These skeptics didn’t realize that departments and groups within departments did not need the capacity of a mainframe for many important tasks. They didn’t recognize how big an impact spreadsheets would have or what it would mean to empower thousands of developers previously unable to create solutions because they couldn’t afford the necessary equipment. A similar pattern unfolded for the web, although desktop publishing is probably more relevant to the subject of desktop manufacturing.
I found via reBang to an excellent, but narrowly focused review of a Design News feature on Rapid Manufacturing’s Role in the Factory of the Future. The discussion is valuable but assumes that traditional high production volume factories will continue to dominate the manufacturing landscape forever and ignores overlapping influences. Like mainframes and printing presses, high production volume factories will be with us for a long time, their fall from dominance will happen faster then most people think and they will be significantly transformed by the emerging paradigm. How will this happen? Services such as Xardas and Ponoko are starting to give people the very powerful experience of “holding ideas in their hands” and providing engineers with insights into new forms of fabrication. With 3D printer prices dropping into the consumer electronics range, the number of people and organizations able to fabricate goods from their computers will grow rapidly. Architects, landscapers and engineering entrepreneurs will find immediate uses for these but many folks especially those lacking professional design and manufacturing experience will be frustrated. Parts will break or won’t come out right, but through Supplier Source and other online sources connections to professionals will be found. It’s not hard to envision Google figuring out a fabrication tie-in to it’s 3D Warehouse. All of this activity will expand the base of experiences and provide valuable feedback for engineers and designers. It will also drive demand for higher end 3D fabrication machines, as well as CNC machines.

At some point I expect that Fed-Ex/Kinkos will probably throw their hat in the ring and some distributed manufacturing network startup with have a huge IPO. Perhaps more significantly, a new type of product or service that hasn’t been thought of yet will emerge(think Lotus 1-2-3 or Amazon). One source in the Design News article put the widespread use of direct digital manufacturing 20 years out but by then nanotechnology will have already started having a significant impact. Desktop manufacturing is being driven by exponentially growing factors it’s just always hard to see it in the early stages. I think Ray Kurzweil has it exactly right

Although technology grows in the exponential domain, we humans live in a linear world. So technological trends are not noticed as small levels of technological power are doubled. Then seemingly out of nowhere, a technology explodes into view. For example, when the Internet went from 20,000 to 80,000 nodes over a two year period during the 1980s, this progress remained hidden from the general public. A decade later, when it went from 20 million to 80 million nodes in the same amount of time, the impact was rather conspicuous.

Ray Kurzweil: The Law of Accelerating Returns

More evidence that hardware is returning to its roots:

“We have the view that we have to become a software company,”

Cisco CEO John Chambers at the Networkers Conference via PC World

Rockefeller University: Measures And Trends

AT&T Industrial Ecology

Forbes Investopedia

Dematerialization and Virtualization

Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility: Consumption

Product Lifecycle Managment and Engineering Systems(ES) are key components of Rhythmeering. Already a major force in engineering systems, Siemens purchase of the world’s leading PLM vendor UGS moves us all further down the road to Rhythmeering.

The acquisition also clearly sets a new agenda for the entire PLM industry. Customers across manufacturing and process industries will now able to benefit from the integration of the physical world, through Siemens’ leading automation design and production technology, and the virtual world, through UGS PLM Software’s leading factory design, product design and digital collaboration software.”

Press Release: Siemens Acquires UGS(emphasis mine)

So what’s the next step along this road? In a word - storytelling. PLM and ES have come from and remain largely focused on products manufactured from bulk materials. The growing role of software has shifted this somewhat towards bits, but these bits are still mainly about material processing. Products are created to play some part in human activities which are best described by stories. Besides, as noted in the Roots of Hardware, dematerialization is reducing the amount of bulk material in products. Nanotechnology is accelerating dematerialization. In addition other “products”(services, media, financial) and human activities(arts, sports) are already dematerialized. By design, Rhythmeering integrates storytelling processes at a fundamental level in ways not found in PLM or ES.

Although Wal-Mart’s supply chain driven vision of RFID isn’t evolving quite as planned

That’s not stopping people from coming up with useful implementations for the tiny tags

Futurismic: RFID - bad for businesses, but great for beaches

For all of it’s resources, Wal-Mart apparently doesn’t have the rhythmeering or even engineering systems expertise to effectively help the ecosystem grow. Understanding the role of participants would allow Wal-Mart to have a greater influence by interacting with companies outside of their immediate supply chain who can contribute to the health of the ecosystem. The RFID ecosystem is much larger than Wal-Mart or the DOD.

Although compliance with Wal-Mart, the DOD, and the Metro Group (in Europe) is still the driving force behind RFID usage, closed-looped applications such as tracking at the pallet, case and item levels is gaining. “The business case and value proposition for RFID is being realized across many types of organizations.”

Industry Week

“The RFID market is poised for stronger growth during 2007 and 2008 due to end users’ increased acceptance of RFID as a valuable tool to increase efficiency in a number of applications,” says Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Brendon Ouimette. “Asset management, inventory management, and work in process visibility applications will require the type of data management capabilities that RFID middleware provides.

Business Intelligence Network

Filed under “why we need the paradigm of Rhythmeering” and “hardware is software crystallized” …

Con Ed said some components of the system are examined about every six weeks, but steam mains underground are generally not inspected because doing so often requires digging up the street.That is something that should change immediately, Agrawal said. Robotic probes can detect corrosion or damage to steam pipes from within, without having to dig them up, he said.

“They have to start looking at the entire system,” he said. “Imagine something like this exploding under Grand Central? Or under Broadway?”
N.Y. blast raises questions about aging infrastructure - CNN.com

Today we have many pressing infrastructure needs some of which have really high stakes:

If we look at today’s global environment we see a relatively high performance system driven by real-time global markets and rapid technological progress. Its performance explains why it is spreading so quickly. However, it is also moderately unstable. In our drive towards higher levels of performance we pursued a path of rampant global interconnectivity that has quickly outpaced our ability to dampen excess. The old dampening functions of borders, distance, government, etc are quickly fading. The result is a system vulnerable to rogue feedback. Even a small amount of it can cause global reverberations. Worse, there are people actively working on ways to introduce this rogue feedback. Iraq is a great demonstration of our inability to dampen excess in the face of active opposition (notice how our goals have drifted from building an allied democracy to stopping civil war).

The long-term solution is to build more stability into the system. The best approach I can think of is a highly interconnected but fundamentally decentralized system (most of the benefits of interconnectivity but with lots of local control). Unfortunately, we are far from realizing that goal, since our current view of the world is based on old models.

Big Bangs

The new paradigm which Rhythmeering represents isn’t anchored in the notion of fixed assets but rather recognizes that

Infrastructures are dynamic. There are flows of information, power, and substances constantly coursing through them.

Cascading System Failure

and expands the notion of the network as computer, to realize that the meshverse is the computer which is in essence software.

“I think it’s time for us as industry leaders really to get our hands around how we’re going to evolve that model, because like it not, the current models of building hundreds or thousands of customized business applications simply aren’t sustainable,” Worrall said. … At Sun, the company currently runs about 1,200 business applications. There is no reason these cannot be provided as online services, Worrall said. In Sun’s vision, the company will buy services, then run them in a browser on a device such as a laptop or a thin client. There will be no need to maintain legions of servers. … The market is already moving to this more efficient paradigm, but Sun internally expects to be largely services-based by 2015, although it could be a few years earlier or later than that, said Worrall. With Sun itself a purveyor of server hardware, a widespread move to services-based computing by users at large would mean a radical change for Sun’s business model. Its customer base will shift to being service providers, who need to maintain large datacenters. With this paradigm, Sun’s server sales volumes potentially could increase, even if the customer list itself shrinks. As Sun moves to a services paradigm, the company will need to focus on an ecosystem to accommodate this, because it is not the same as having a traditional ISV strategy
Sun anticipates move to software services
(the entire podcast)

Rhythmeering supports this kind of ecosystem.

Don Park, having looked at the IBM Jazz video has mixed feelings I can relate to. He suggests that it’s too cold and disconnected from it’s namesake. Park also raises some signficant questions and concerns:

Where is the life in engineering? What will engineering be like if it’s measured only in metrics and graphs?

… we can feel like less than a person and more like a switch waiting to fire in time. But then maybe there is no room for us in the machinery of global economy.

Jazz Thoughts

I’d sum up his thoughts by saying IBM Jazz “ain’t got that swing”. The good news is that by making the association with Jazz, IBM is pointing themselves and the broader market in the right direction.

The answers to Park’s questions about engineering lie in Rhythmeering which shifts the focus from isolated, machine-driven metrics to collaborative people-centered harmonies. The machine metrics are good to the degree they serve human objectives but when people begin to serve the interests of machines, perhaps it’s time to revisit the messages of movies such as The Matrix and The Terminator. Information systems and the human organizations they are intended to support can benefit greatly from jazz paradigm but you can’t really swing unless everybody is participating - not just developers IBM’s Jazz is for. However, in order for that to happen, developers first need to start getting into the collaborative mindset IBM’s Jazz points to. As they do so the programming tools and user interfaces will have to become more flexible and accessible. GVScript will soon show the way for programming and when it can be connected to user interfaces such as those seen in Rhythmeering In Motion and Touching The Meshverse, we’ll see organizations “swingin to the digital times”.