Allen, you seem to be in good company with your prognosis. Here is an article lifted from the CPQ thread where the head of CPQ seems to agree with you. MSFT with their .net programs and initiatives also seems to believe in this. I wonder though about the future of SUN and the Oracles which have a centralized outlook IMO. And EMC could be having a lot of competition with CPQ/IBM open storage software standards it would seem and this distributed approach you would think would favor NAS-NTAP type approach or even the massively parallel raid storage. I hope Wind will fit into all this? And I think you are saying it will both on the software on the consumer/user devises or the connection or storage devices .Here's the article:
Rich
November 01, 2000 11:02
****Compaq CEO Bets Company On Distributed Computing
CARLSBAD, CALIFORNIA, U.S.A., 2000 NOV 1 (NB) -- By Michael
Bartlett, Newsbytes. Not only does Compaq Computer Corp.'s
[NYSE:CPQ] CEO Michael Capellas believe that distributed computing, a
combination of the peer-to-peer computing seen on Napster, grid computing
and distributed information infrastructure, is the number one trend for 2001,
he is "betting the company on it."
Capellas delivered one of the opening day keynote addresses at Red
Herring's NDA 2000 conference in Carlsbad, California this week.
Capellas declared that there are three key trends in computing and
communication that will have the greatest effect on those industries in the
coming years.
"First of all, distributed computing is going to be very important. I believe in
it, and I am betting the company on it," he said to the crowd of about 400.
"Second, Asia will usher in mobile e-commerce. This second trend will force
the first trend to happen. Third, telcos will shift from carriage to value-added
services as their principal source of revenue."
"The net result of trends one, two and three combined is that computing will
be moving to the edge of the network," he added.
Capellas gave a brief look at the evolution of computing. He said that the
primary stage was the mainframe era, which was driven by vendors.
Following the development of the PC, the second epoch was the
client/server era, which was technology-driven. With the widespread
penetration of the Internet in the past few years, Capellas sees a pervasive
information era driven by customers.
"The whole world is moving to rich content delivered wirelessly," he
predicted. "In the United States, it will start with rich content delivery on
PCs and will move to wireless Internet appliances. In Europe there are 245
million wireless users, 83 percent of whom are using GSM, so the European
market will develop in a different way. Japan is different from the other two
markets. It will take two to three years before the standards are figured out."
According to Capellas, wireless Internet reached 50 million users in just one
year, making it the fastest-adopted technology in history. In contrast, it took
38 years for radio to have 50 million users, 16 years for television, 13 years
for personal computers and 4 years for the Internet.
"There will be 850 million to 1 billion wireless Internet users in three years,"
said Capellas. "The rapid adoption is made possible by technology. The cost
of creating bandwidth dropped 99 percent in the last 10 years, and fiber
capacity is doubling every six months. The content and the commerce on the
Web are likewise growing exponentially. There are 2.5 billion HTML pages
today, and that is growing at a rate of 7.5 million pages per day.
E-commerce is $240 billion today and will be $1.2 trillion by 2002. Instant
messaging is expanding to business, which will have many useful
applications, many of them wireless."
Capellas said that a move to distributed Web architecture is the next step
following the previous events in the evolution of the Web, especially in the
way that the online business world works.
"The first move was from HTTP to central servers," he recalled. "Businesses
wanted bigger page sizes, multimedia and more bandwidth. They also had to
keep up with higher expectations of consumers. The last big move was from
central servers to server farms, but I do not think that is where the story
ends.
"What is next," Capellas continued, "is distributed Web architecture. It will
minimize physical distance and avoid routing delays. Another result will be
more use of low-bandwidth segments. There are a huge number of potential
users in low-bandwidth areas. Finally, caching will proliferate."
Capellas said that the forces driving the change to distributed Web
architecture include a new wave of applications and growing expectations.
"The new applications are part of a wave that brings lower cost, caching,
streaming video and audio, and support of rich content. Users expect faster,
more responsive Web sites. They also want to be able to access them with
many different devices and form factors," he added.
The next step for the back end, according to Capellas, is storage to enable
rich content.
"There will be a huge data store of multiple terabytes of data. The network
edge is where access meets infrastructure to deliver pervasive, personalized
content and commerce. The pieces are not new, but the speed of
convergence is," he said.
Another topic of the NDA 2000 conference is Red Herring's prediction that
the convergence of entertainment content and computers will fail again in
2001. For Capellas, the point is not that convergence may or may not occur
in the next 14 months, but that it is definitely coming.
"There is no doubt that there will be convergence of PCs, the Internet,
mobility and wireless. Will there be a universal device? Not in 2001, but
soon. Digital content will become the center of home entertainment, and not
just through desktops," he predicted. "There will be music players, streamed
video and audio, interactive gaming, content and more content, and wireless
home LANs (local area networks)."
Reported by Newsbytes.com, newsbytes.com |
