lessons from the PC era

It’s interesting to consider the history of the PC and learn some lessons. The landscape of computing that we have now resulted from a sandwiching effect of cheaper and cheaper scientific workstations and more and more powerful consumer hobby kits (some say toys). By the mid 1980s, this trend was recognized and efforts were begun from both sides to capture the computing market. Today we know that the hobby kit lineage won, and as a result, most workstation companies eventually folded in the 2000s, though they survived for a while by clinging to the enterprise. (Incidently, IBM and HP did not, because they were large and diversified enough to do something about it.)

But this is not the whole story.
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Living in the cloud

Cloud computing is taking off. That’s like the first sentence of some recent “introduction” mumbo jumbo I wrote for some paper. There are of course different models of this.

One is to use all services that Google provides, which are entirely built on web applications. I don’t believe this is the right model.
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