My goal with this blog

I write about relevant changes in the way that people use the web and how startups are built to provide services and products for this ever changing wonderful thing we still know as "the web." As a former entrepreneur turned early-stage investor, my greatest hope is for this to be useful to other folks that are like me in the hopes that they can avoid some of the mistakes I've made.

From:
Antonio Rodriguez

Mobile gadgets are about as sexy as keyboards and mice in the era of the datacenter as PC

tech
by Antonio on

An entrepreneur came by to pitch this week and said something that reminded me of a sticker from the schwag bag at Google's I/O conference in 2008: that the mega datacenters being built out of commodity hardware densely packed represent the future of the PC.

I'm not sure whether he meant to say the PC industry instead but the comment crystalized for me the fact that despite 2010 having been an incredible year for device innovation— we started the year with the Nexus One, got the iPad, the iPhone 4, a variety of Android-powered Samsung devices of all sizes, the SSD-powered Macbook Air that finally executed on the promise of the netbook while Chrome OS and the CR-48 are trying to put the rest of the netbook market on life support— all of the attention paid to these devices might actually be helping to bury the real storyline here.

While we've got a pre-Cambrian explosion of access devices, it's never been more true that the real power comes from what lies at the other end of that relatively thin interface. As Paul Bucheit, ex-Google guy, writes:

One way of understanding this new architecture is to view the entire Internet as a single computer. This computer is a massively distributed system with billions of processors, billions of displays, exabytes of storage, and it's spread across the entire planet. Your phone or laptop is just one part of this global computer, and its primarily purpose is to provide a convenient interface. The actual computation and data storage is distributed in surprisingly complex and dynamic ways, but that complexity is mostly hidden from the end user.

Which of course begs the question: if it's the datacenter that is going to replace the PC, why are we so obsessed as users on the access device itself? Geeks and gadgets and objects of lust and all that aside, I'm beginning to think that this obsession at conferences with the new access form factor may end up looking in hindsight like the great trackball fetish of 1985 (when all of the early mouse users went gaga over colored Kensington trackball pointing devices).