[hbt]

It's not so much change as it is exploration. You can either wait for the best player to come out or start betting.

In the 70s, the exploration was with different hardware architectures and then we settled with general purpose computer chips.

In the 90s, it was operating systems, protocols and standards. Eventually commercial interests (mainly Microsoft) lost and we settled for open stuff they couldn't control.

Same story with cloud computing, a technology that didn't really exist 10 years ago and is still being developed. Eventually we will settle for aws or openStack and common processes will be developed that companies like linode, amazon, google etc. can all share and use and the software will be open source because there will be no major differences between all of them.

Every technology experiences a phase of exploration where people contribute left and right and eventually we settle for a handful of major players. Remember the MVC frameworks competition in Ruby/Python/PHP less than 8 years ago?

Just bet carefully