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Issue 43 - February 2009
Editorial Intro - Matt Nicholson
Back in the days when men wore white coats and women sat at teletypes, companies rented rather than purchased their computers. Software came ready-installed and if anything went wrong you called up your supplier who'd send a man (it was almost always a man) around to fix it. It was a cosy relationship. As time went on the first on-line systems appeared, allowing workers to interact with the computer from terminals that could be in a different room, or even connected by phone, however the business model remained the same.
Then the revolution came, headed by two guys from the West Coast with the Apple I and consolidated with the launch of the IBM Personal Computer. The most obvious difference was that anyone could buy a computer for a few hundred pounds. Less obvious was the growth of software as a separate industry. You could no longer expect to get the software you needed ready installed. Instead you went to other companies, such as Lotus and Microsoft, for your word processors and spreadsheets. Software became a packaged product, and although technically you were only buying a licence to use, it felt like buying any other off-the-shelf commodity.
Next came the ability to network, but this time around the clients could boast as much power as the servers, allowing far more flexibility in application design but causing major headaches with regards to deployment, maintenance and licensing. However new releases came thick and fast, each offering real benefits over their predecessor, which guaranteed the software industry a steady revenue stream.
Then came the Internet, connecting us all into a single, global network. This could only work if the clients all spoke the same language, so once again power shifted back to the servers and clients became glorified teletypes, viewing the world through Web browsers.
Meanwhile, here in the 21st century, large-scale client applications have become problematic for the software industry. It is getting harder to offer real benefits in each successive generation, while the open source model only highlights the complexities of proprietary licensing.
On the other hand, the development of more powerful Web-based clients, such as Flash and Silverlight, coupled with ever more reliable broadband connections, is opening up new possibilities for delivering computing power where it is needed. Hosted services such as those being offered by Microsoft, Salesforce, Google and others are being rented rather than sold, while 'netbooks' are delivering a new style of low-cost hardware that can make use of such services from anywhere with broadband or wireless. We have come a long way from the mainframe, in that we can now deliver computing power to almost anywhere in the world, but the business model is not totally unrecognisable.
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