Last month, I expressed boredom with the personal computer. Beyond gigahertz, gigabytes, and wireless, I complained, personal computers sold today look and feel a lot like those sold ten years ago.
Last month, I expressed boredom with the personal computer. Beyond gigahertz, gigabytes, and wireless, I complained, personal computers sold today look and feel a lot like those sold ten years ago.
Of course, that’s not entirely true. Over the past decade, PCs have gotten cheaper while the list of standard features has expanded enormously. Indeed, a veritable supercomputer can be purchased readily for little more than a game console, and previously high-end features have become ho-hum: clock speed, RAM, CD-ROM, CD-R, DVD, polygons-per-second, and wireless, in roughly that order.
Of course, the driving force behind commodity pricing and features is, well, commodity. Demand goes up, availability goes up, and prices come down. What is only affordable or usable by early-adopters becomes status quo.
Interestingly, the path of Linux adoption is following an almost identical course. Initially the darling of only gearheads, Linux spread via word-of-mouth to other species of geek, the academics, the scientists, and those perennial tinkerers, the system administrators. Once loosed in the office, Linux crept into the server room as file, print, and web servers, into the backoffice as an application server, and most recently, onto the desktop for personal use. All the while, hardware was becoming even more of a commodity.
The end result? The combination of commodity software, namely, Linux, commodity hardware, and open standards, is repeating history — not only the history of the personal computer, but also the history of Unix.
So, today, while personal computing is rather staid, enterprise…
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