Bill Gates Says The Smarts Are Moving To The Ends
from the moving-out-bound dept
Back in January, Nicholas Carr became the latest in a long line of folks to think he came up with the idea for the network computer. He wrote an opinion piece in Business Week saying that the desktop computer was dead and that with all these web-based applications, you’d never need another desktop again. Bill Gates apparently found this article worthy of attention to the point that he’s penned a response noting that the power of the PC isn’t just in centralized servers but in the fact that plenty of intelligence has moved out to the ends of the network. To some extent, he’s underplaying this point. There obviously is plenty of room for server-based applications, and many users are moving more and more applications in that direction. However, just because there are more network-enabled server-based apps, it doesn’t mean the power at the ends is useless. Those cycles are an opportunity that can be used, whether in distributed computing applications or for other local tasks.
