LAS VEGAS–Michael Dell, the founder and CEO of the eponymous computing hardware giant, fielded questions from the media, analyst and influencer community during Dell EMC World. Topics covered included the future of the internet of things, augmented and virtual reality and what 5G will mean for computing infrastructure. Here are some of the highlights.
On IoT: “The cost of making something intelligent is approaching zero dollars, and that means there’s going to be a lot more of them. You take all that data and you apply machine intelligence to it…then you get even better with a whole new set of hardware capabilities that accelerate that, then you repeat the process. The last 30 years of IT have been compelling. I think the next 30 years will be much, much more so.”
On IT transformation: Companies “have to reimagine their business in the context of all these new technologies. aAch company has to take it step by step. Each industry is going to be a little bit different in how digital transformation applies to it. But I don’t see any part of the world is exempt from this. I happen to believe that technology plus humans is more the answer as it goes to technology versus the humans. I think it’s always been that way. I happen to have an optimistic view of the world.”
On AR/VR: “The really interesting thing about video and visualization is you can take in information far faster with your eyes than any other way. The VR and AR we have today is sort of game-like. It’s not very high resolution, the frame rate isn’t so great, and so ,as you take those technologies and move them along the spectrum of 2K, 4K, 8K, 24 frames, 48 frames, 60 frames, 2D, 3D, then into 360 VR, you get photorealistic. It’s like teleportation, actually. But, we’re kind of a long way off from that. If I take all those enhancements to the technology, the amount of data required is hundreds of times what it is today. That means you’re in some kind of connected infrastructure, we have the fifth generation cellular network coming, and that’s very exciting. We look at AR and VR and see enormous potential not just in entertainment but also in training and business applications. My wife and I are involved in something called the Dell Medical School… They’re using AR and VR to train the next generation of medical students. I think we’re just at the beginning of this. It takes time for these things to occur, but the speed of innovation and all of the possibilities that are created with technologies like AR and VR is tremendous.”
More on 5G: This will “create a new kind of distributed computing and distributed cloud. That is going to be rather amazing. That fifth generation cellular network is not so you can talk on the phone faster. It’s about data. Not all of that data will sit in one place. You’re going to have an even more distributed computing environment.”
