There’s a reason executives at so many firms now tout the coming age of “embedded” or “machine-to-machine” communications. As Intel (News - Alert) Corporation President and CEO Paul Otellini has argued, “personal computing” is expanding beyond the PC to nearly every kind of electronic device. And as computing goes, so is communications, fixed and wireless, but particularly wireless.

 

“Computing is no longer confined to your computer – it’s everywhere,” Otellini noted recently. And where computing happens, so does communications.

 

That’s one reason AT&T (News - Alert) believes connections to car entertainment systems and tracking devices could create as much as an additional $1 billion of revenue for AT&T over the next few years, said Glenn Lurie, AT&T’s head of emerging devices. Lurie said AT&T already has plans to add wireless services to almost 20 consumer devices, such as e-readers, mini-computers and digital photo frames, in the near future.

 

In the next few years there could be as many as three wirelessly connected devices for every person in the United States, Lurie suggests. For those of you who track such things, that means wireless penetration of about 300 percent. Many of those new applications will involve devices in cars, on trucks, pets or mobile devices. But connections also are coming for additional in-home devices such as TVs, which increasingly will feature Ethernet connections so Internet-delivered content can easily be displayed on the TV screen.

 

“Two years ago I showed a suite of futuristic, compute-intensive applications for handheld devices,” Otellini said. “The computing was really done on a desktop PC behind the curtain because handhelds didn’t have the processing capability yet. Two years later, the future is here.”

 

All of those developments are precursors to a fundamental shift in computing architecture that most observers believe is coming: a shift from “personal computing” to the next era that might be dubbed the “mobile Internet” computing paradigm. Others might prefer some sort of “cloud computing” nomenclature. Such shifts have occurred several times in the past.

 

Mainframe computing was displaced by mini-computer architectures, then by networked PCs. Many think the emergence of the Internet is an interstitial development that bridges the PC era and the coming era that will feature remote processing, storage and a much bigger role for mobility. Though each era has expanded the range of applications, the PC era has lead to the biggest extension of the range of applications. Computing largely was confined to back office enterprise transactions. In the mini-computer era computing began to be used by smaller enterprises and organizations on a broader scale, with some extension to end user line-of-business applications.

 

The PC era “democratized” computing, extending computing universally to organizations of all size, plus consumers, though initially with a focus on productivity applications. With the arrival of the Internet era, most consumer activities related to learning, games and hobbies, communicating, music and video consumption, personal productivity and transactions also were made part of the everyday computing experience. The ability to do all those things now is being extended to personal mobile devices, which will have similar impact: extending and broadening the range of activities, times, places and manner of use.

 

Transitions of computing architecture are important to the ecosystem for one simple historical reason. So far, no firm that was dominant in one phase of computing managed to retain that leadership in the era that followed. That means the likelihood of huge changes for individual ecosystem participants, no matter how big and powerful they now appear.

 

On a day-to-day basis, most of us think about hot new devices, applications or end-user behavior changes. But there are bigger forces now at work. In the past, it has not been possible to foresee all the changes a different era would bring, so we are likely to be surprised by the next era as well.

 

And though “disruption” seems most often to begin with “small” firms doing what appear to be odd things, real displacement always is completed by large and sizable firms. In part that’s because small firms become dominant forces. One might argue that the most profound levels of disruption today are lead by large, sizable firms such as Apple (News - Alert) and Google, for example.