Feb 162012
Why the world is different to when Sun talked of the “networked PC”….
There I was sitting at my desk when Hootsuite popped a message from @RohiniOnTwtr said “… @nivio #cloudcomputing #cloud why do I have a sense of dejavu. Didn’t Sun say network is the computer a decade ago? 
”
So yes if you think about it Sun and Larry Ellison talked about the networked computer over a decade ago but here are some of the key differences from a market as well as “customer want” or “perceived want”
1. We are no longer talking of a home-grown device talking to a networked Mainframe – its now about having ANY Device connect over the internet to your deskop / data / apps
2. The Network PC was clearly a well articulated vision but in the period when broadband was 28.8kpbs you would not be stretching the argument to imply it was more a networked PC in a local area network – ie thin client to local server – where bandwidth was still 10mbps or 100mbps in those days.
3. We have or better still moving from a world where we are selling technology to a world where we are trying to abstract that away from the end user – ultimately look at what consumers do today – its somewhat magical except what they do with their compute device (alas the tablets have started to change this) – it requires too much “headache” to maintain a laptop, pc even a mac.
4. The notion of a “centralised” computer is actually where the mainframe was born – so you could argue that IBM got it before anyone else and then we went to the decentralised world and now we are going back to the utility world.
5. Today broadband is widespread, data is the new currency and people want the ability to work on “their own terms” yet not have to worry about the “how” just the “when” and “now”
6. The use cases have also evolved considerable from BYOD (bring your own device) to work, to needing software for more and more things and thus wanting to rent when needed, to basic college and university work, to grandparents keeping in touch with their grandkids…. today the Computer is as ubiquitous as my toothbrush!
6. And yes Larry (if I may) had the vision sealed – just like others got the tablet (and touch) well before Apple and Google dominated the market space.
Feb 162012
Janet CinelliAnd a true visionary: “If computers of the kind I have advocated become the computers of the future, then computing may someday be organized as a public utility just as the telephone system is a public utility.” Professor John McCarthy, the father of time-sharing, at the MIT Centennial in 1961