[PaulHoule]

Some technology has trouble scaling coming and going. Like FPGA. If you are going to make something with FPGA but will sell more than 10,000 units you will be dramatically cheaper with ASIC. Each application that is is developed on FPGA will sell a small number of units so multiply that by a small number of applications and that is a small number.

Similarly there is not a market for that many large distributed systems.

What there is an endless market for is new applications from the medium to small side. For instance there is the resurgence of "low code", "no code", and many participants who feel underserved with current technology compared to what Google gets.

See this guy

https://www.servethehome.com/

as a transitional figure between "modern data centers" and "buy any 1 liter PC off ebay and see what happens".

The Baltimore Police Department keeps track of incident reports in a big Lotus Notes database, so do many 3-letter and more-letter agencies in the area south of there. Lotus Notes had some algorithms for merging changes that people make to "objects" with a very JSON-like structure that meant people built amazing things in the 1990s. (e.g. 10 years ahead of Salesforce.com!)

It must have been patents that kept the technology out of other products but it seems those must be expired by now.

[ta473589]

Thanks for the insight. I have often wondered if there is a space between the companies operating very large data centers and those running small businesses. In distributed systems, my own experience is:

- the very large organizations will engineer whatever they must to meet their availability/performance targets - the mid-size orgs will use whatever they can from the big orgs to work in their area of competence - the small orgs are happy with the basics

There may well be a middle ground that I should explore more.

Thanks for the servethehome.com reference. I'll try to learn from his approach.