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sodomizer | 13 years ago

You mean, sort of like how we all used to log on to mainframes, or rent Linux accounts from our webhosts?

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scott_s|13 years ago

Yes, sort of. But the scale at which it is happening is not like that. Even a small company still owned that mainframe, and physically stored it onsite. And that Linux account on your webhost wasn't quite as capable as a computer you could own - you couldn't, for example, spin up 10,000 of them and create an ad-hoc cluster to run your giant MPI application.

Organizations will start viewing computers as a utility they subscribe to, rather than something they own. Should we buy another server, or just rent them through Amazon? In the future, I think that fewer organizations will own hardware - to the extent that it will change the hardware market completely.