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More on smart vs. dumb, thick vs. thin

November 22, 2009, 12:50 pm

After yesterday’s post, I found some other folks who have written about the cycle between smart/dumb terminals, thick/thin clients, and centralized/decentralized computing.

Dharmesh Shah wrote “The Thin Client, Thick Client Cycle” at OnStartups in 2006: “One of the repeated cycles I have seen in my 15+ years in the software industry is that we constantly go through this ‘thin client / thick client’ cycle.”  He seems to disagree with what I suggested yesterday, that Web application technology (including JavaScript) might end the cycle, saying:

My thesis now is that we are due for another cycle.  Why?  For the same reason we had the prior cycles:  Because there are still problems with the current model.  User interfaces for true “thin client” applications basically suck. . . .  The problem goes back to the platform . . .  If I were looking to reproduce the user experience of even relatively trivial desktop applications today on the web, it’s hard.

Unclear whether Dharmesh really disagrees with my hypothesis, or if he’s just saying that the developer tools and platforms will evolve to make writing good Web apps much easier.  (He claims, though, that: “What drives these technology cycles as much as user experience is the developer experience.”  Paul Graham implied the same thing in his recent essay: “If programmers used some other device for mobile web access, they’d start to develop apps for that instead.”  I think I disagree, but that’s a post for another time.)

More recently, Hal Pomeranz wrote that “the whole Cloud Computing story felt just like another turn in the epic cycle between centralized and decentralized computing” (“Future Cloudy, Ask Again Later” at Righteous IT, Feb 2009).  He seems to agree with a point I made about the past cycles being driven by economics:

The centralized vs. decentralized cycle keeps turning because in any given computing epoch the costs of all of the above factors rise and fall.  This leads IT folks to optimize one factor over another, which promotes shifts in computing strategy, and the wheel turns again.

Finally, I found a scholarly paper on the subject from 1999 titled “Centralization/decentralization cycles in computing: market evidence” (by D. A. Peak and M. H. Azadmanesh).  Abstract:

Strategies concerning centralized and decentralized commercial computing have been major issues for more than two decades. Using longitudinal sales data consolidated into three major computer categories (mainframes, minicomputers, and microcomputers), we investigate whether historical market data show evidence of centralization and decentralization. Our finding of cyclic behavior leads us to conclude that computing sales data exhibits broadly cyclic characteristics. We suggest that computing strategies oscillate unevenly between domination of centralization and decentralization, and that commercial computing has already experienced two centralization/decentralization cycles. Currently, computing is nearing the end of the second cycle’s decentralization period and is at the threshold of centralization in a third cycle.

Maybe the most important question to ask is:  Why are so many of us in the industry so ignorant of its history?  At least, I feel woefully ignorant of computing history, and I bet I’m not alone.  As with political history in the US today, it seems that most of us only know the history that we lived through.

Anyone know a good source for an overview of the history of the industry, that would cover major trends such as this one?

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  • I agree. In fact I came to the same epiphany a few weeks ago. There's definitely a cyclical nature to the business. I think of it as a pendulum. Each time it swings to the other side, it does so less severely. I propose that at some point, it'll come to rest. But that'll probably be in 50-75 years. I think the future is intelligent clients that do most of the processing, but can determine when its needs computing assistance from other nodes on the network. Conversely, data will live mostly in the cloud, but brought down locally to be worked on, then pushed back to where it lives.

    I think Dharmesh raises a good point about the Developer experience being a primary driver. After all, they are the ones with the ability to innovate. Most businesses dont get involved until later in the game. Most businesses help with evolution not revolution. Another primary driver is the military. The Internet started out as a DARPA project, with decentralization and redundancy at its core.
  • I'd recommend "Universay History of Computing" by Georges Ifrah. I picked up a copy of this a while ago and found it to be a very engaging read. It starts with the dawn of civilization and the earliest mechanical aids to computation all the way up to modern quantum computers. Being that it was published in 2001, there's a lot of the "internet age" it doesn't cover, but it certainly will give you an excellent idea of what happened before you graduated college.

    http://www.amazon.com/Universal-History-Computi...
  • For the record, I actually (mostly) agree with you. :)

    My basic point is that the industry *does* go through cycles, and that with each cycle, things (generally) get better along one dimension and worse along another. That is, every time we shift back to the "dumb terminal", the dumb terminal is smarter than the prior generation of dumb terminals.

    For example, in the shift from the standard client-server to web environments (think pre-AJAX days), the web user experience (as far as an application) was *dramatically* worse than the desktop applications we were used to.

    Also, I *could* argue that all the heavy Javascript that is going on today in many modern web apps is actually a form of shifting back to the client-server worlds -- it's just that we have a more standard "container" for that functionality. But, I'll save that argument for another day.
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