“The Death of Hardware”?
Forbes magazine recently wrote about “The Death of Hardware“. As in many Forbes articles I find a bit of sensationalism but it was interesting to ponder.
This one caught my attention due to my recent experience using Google applications to centralize control of basic spreadsheet information; the on-line applications allowed a project team to easily use spreadsheets together while talking on the phone on a simple project tracking assignment. The value of this type of central sharing is tremendous in that it eliminates sending files to each other and doing multiple updates and versioning of essentially the same document. Most larger companies already have central servers to enable this. But now the little guy can do it for free.
Forbes‘ example of Zillow, the real estate estimating service, using Amazon servers to do a property update project, brings another view of relatively cheap services offered over the Internet. Forbes‘ claims that Zillow said it would need “six months and millions of dollars” to do it- the job on Amazon took “three weeks and cost less than $50,000″. While I think the “savings” are a bit vague, of more concern is the control and management issues involved in such a project.
Have you used computing horsepower over the internet? How about applications? What was your experience in terms of value, cost, time saved, and results? Do you think that “hardware” is going through the end of it’s lifecycle? What developments and trends will make this happen?
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