Software patents in the cloud

Posted Apr 6, 2017 14:58 UTC (Thu) by landley (guest, #6789)
Parent article: Software patents in the cloud

> For better or for worse, the current phase of the computing industry
> is focused on consolidation. Computing that was once done in
> organizations is moving to the data centers of a relatively small
> number of huge cloud providers.

Of course. History's repeating itself.

The central thesis of my 2013 ELC talk (the one that convinced Android to merge Toybox) was Mainframe->minicomputer->microcomputer->smartphone. Each generation gets kicked up into the "server space" when a new technology comes along to displace the machine humans directly interact with (and access all the others through). We forget that people used to deliver punched cards to mainframe operators and stand around waiting for their printout, or that they signed up for timeslots on minicomputer terminals. When the PC kicked a _second_ generation upstairs, minicomputers and mainframes merged into an indistiguishable mass (with IBM and DEC fighting to the death to monetize it) because there's only one "server space". Now the smartphone's doing it again (and Amazon is taking IBM's head while queen plays over the lightning show).

The PC getting kicked up into the server space has a marketing budget, so they've come up with a name for it ("the cloud") but it's the exact same big iron money pit the S390 was trying to monetize with five nines of uptime and insurance policies and a bunch of 50-somethings with 30 years of experience making sure that when bad things happen everybody still get paid.

My old talk followed the smartphone stuff branching away from this, of course (http://youtu.be/SGmtP5Lg_t0). Big iron has always been "boring but lucrative" because most _new_ things come from younguns playing with the machine right in front of them.

Rob