Just ordered...

[Peter Korsten]

Martin Naef schreef:

>> It's early days, but I definitely see the computer/computing business go 
>> back to a client/server model, but with the internet thrown in. A move 
>> away from generic PCs that are customised for a specific task, to 
>> smaller, dedicated devices that do just a few things, but do those very 
>> well. And store all your data on the 'net.
> 
> I'm sceptical - we've heard the story before too many times under 
> different names, yet it always turned out that bandwidth was more scarce 
> than local processing power or storage capacity. However, it is clear 
> that some form of centralised document storage will be used for 
> increasingly more services (it's already standard for e-mail).

It's more of a social issue than a technical one, I believe. We've seen 
people become much more mobile, where it's not immediately clear whether 
they've become more mobile because technology in the form of mobile 
phones allowed them to, or that mobile phones found an open market after 
people started to become much more mobile.

(When I say 'people become mobile', I mean that they are more likely to 
switch jobs, but not necessarily move close to a new job because house 
prices elsewhere are too high. As a result, they travel more, be it in 
their cars or in public transport.)

However, I also think that there will be a move towards lower power 
devices, that use high-bandwidth wireless services. For instance, LTE 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3GPP_Long_Term_Evolution) promises very 
high bandwidth for the future.

Just as an example, when we had the mini-meet at Gert's, Perry and Joost 
had taken their notebooks, and were creating some noise. Joost's 
notebook was plugged into Gert's stereo via a cable.

But with on-line storage of both applications and data, they could have 
done all this on perhaps their snazzy phones, or run it on Gert's 
system, one way or another... given where we were 10 or 15 years ago, 
and where we are now, and considering the ever rising costs of energy, 
it's something that I can see happening.

> I think they'll rather push things like their sharepoint servers and 
> other forms of server-based document hosting and collaboration. After 
> all, even my mobile phone these days has enough power to run something 
> like word...

Personally, I think that Microsoft should be ashamed for selling such a 
piece of rubbish like Sharepoint, but yeah, you're probably on the mark 
here.

- Peter