Comments on: More on smart vs. dumb, thick vs. thin

By: Andrew Woods

Andrew Woods — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 05:55:15 +0000

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.

By: Andrew Miner

Andrew Miner — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:52:45 +0000

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-Computing-Quantum-Computer/dp/0471441473/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1259171314&sr=8-3

By: Dharmesh Shah

Dharmesh Shah — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 05:21:46 +0000

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.