Despite most major tech companies having a myriad of exciting tech and an army of geniuses that build them, there are still problems that try believe they will not be able to solve on their owns and now some of the world’s largest tech companies including Google, Dell, Intel, Box, Citrix, Imprivata, Okta, RingCentral, Slack, VMWare, and Zoom have joined together to form a new Modern Computing Alliance with the purpose of tackling joint problems around security, remote work, and other enterprise issues collectively (as reported by The Verge)
The goal of the new alliance is to create a pool of knowledge and resources that can be used to develop new standards and interoperable technologies that will help in the rapid migrate of the world to more digital workspaces. The Modern Computing Alliance has set their first four focus areas on performance; security and identity; remote work, productivity, and collaboration; and health care, with more areas to be added as they solve problems in these spheres, as revealed by John Solomon, Google’s vice president of Chrome OS:
Today, we’re excited to announce Google’s membership in the Modern Computing Alliance — to address the biggest IT challenges facing companies today with integration from silicon to cloud. Working with a group of forward-thinking industry leaders, we’re aligning standards and technologies to provide companies with the choice of high-performance, cloud-first computing solutions from the vendor of their choice who provide modern solutions for the modern era of business
The needs that our users are expecting and the way that compute is changing really require a new way of working. It’s not the most natural thing to say, ‘Let’s form a consortium.’ But this isn’t an ordinary time
Google is no doubt a major player in this initiative being the biggest of the tech companies to join with plans to specifically open up its Chrome browser to better integrate with a lot of the technologies developed by all these partner companies.
While on specifically mentioned, as much as this initiative is claimed as a collective resolution of shared problems, that the likes of Microsoft, Apple and Amazon are not included leads you to wonder if it’s also just an opportunity for these companies to each try and gain some market share over these three other giants, even though Google itself is arguably just as big as they are. That could just be my own cynical mind though and this consortium could definitely solve some problems with more altruistic intentions.
Either way, that amount of shared collective intelligence should be able to achieve quite a lot if they can learn to play nicely. I guess we shouldn’t rule out the Modern Computing Alliance changing its name to Skynet just yet.
Last Updated: December 14, 2020
