Here's what I thought were the meaty comments from the New York times article:
"People want to own their own information but they don't want to
maintain it, and that is driving the shift toward centralization," said Adele
Goldberg, a member of the team at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in
the early 1970s that created the founding concepts of personal
computing.
Microsoft is preparing for the day when people may keep much of their
personal and professional information on large servers with an initiative
called Megaserver. The concept is that a person will be able tap into a
large central database via the Web to get e-mail, personal schedules,
news, weather updates and other information anywhere, anytime.
In an internal memo last fall titled "The Era Ahead," Bill Gates, the
Microsoft chairman, pointed to the opportunity as software becomes
more a services business. "We get a closer relationship with customers
and a predictable revenue model because they pay us a regular fee for
the service," he wrote.
In Silicon Valley, dozens of start-ups have been created as Internet
services to centrally handle personal information. The new companies
mostly focus on e-mail, calendars and back-up file storage to insure
information is not lost when an individual's PC crashes.
|
