| >> Personal computers with attached storage are disappearing and giving way to thin clients attached to the mainframe - without computing power, individuals have less choice. > Only for those who don't use more than a smart phone. Everybody who takes photos, does engineering, develops software, works with media, plays games, or has a laptop, will at least have external local storage of some kind. I don't see why (if we're talking 10 years time here). Cameras comes with wifi, Photoshop and other software is rented in the cloud, arguably it's easier to have your data in one place, close to the processing -- publishing is done in the cloud (even if the end result is a photo print, it's likely that you use a third party to do the printing). Games streaming is already a thing. Granted, there are some hard physical limits on latency (speed of light roundtrip) -- but I see no particular well-founded reason to believe all our computing privileges can't be locked up in "the cloud". It's much more feasible for a small team to produce an entire computer today (as in instruction set, volatile and non-volatile memory, i/o etc), than it was in the 70s - but it's still fantastically more expensive than buying off the shelf hardware. Which means that if the majority of the market truly moves to locked down devices, everyone will have to move to locked down devices. >> What's the next step? > Something else produced on IBM compatible PCs or Macs, naturally. I think how Apple handled Final Cut Pro is a great example of how dangerous tivoization of an entire platform for computing can be. |