Theoretically more competition could increase prices, but it depends on a lot of stuff, and especially how the firms set pricing.
More likely to decrease prices though.
Anyways, I do think for a lot of stuff the cloud is the future. People wouldn’t have to think about their own hardware, it just works™.
I’m with Wendell, I’d rather have control over my data and not have to pay them a monthly fee.
The world operates on a pattern of decentralization and centralization. The ebb and flow. It’s an unending pattern.
We’re going through a centralization period right now where people are becoming dependent on organizations for comforts they used to provide themselves.
This is not just in tech, but that’s another topic for another thread.
Fear not, for a major catastrophe of the technical form will divest people of their trust in so-called “big tech”
Serious note: it would be interesting to see ARM chips developed specifically for database performance in mind. Because it’s to the point where general purpose hardware isn’t going to cut it anymore for some workloads. So their might be a brief return to how it was decades ago.
People were skeptical about cars as well. And aircraft.
It’s already happening mate.
Real people are doing real work with tablets, mobile phones and in the next decade things like the hololens will take off.
I’m not talking about desk bound people. I’m talking about people actually doing physical work. The people today who typically do not work with computers, the 90% - are going to be using this stuff. And rather than have multiple devices, they will expect (and will get) their single device to do everything.
Personally I can’t wait for some glasses (i.e., AR gear) that have actual power. 30" monitor? Fuck no, the world is my monitor. The tech exists to build this sort of thing TODAY.
People have been doing those things using PCs from 10-20 years ago. It’s not like you need a bleeding edge PC to do that.
If you think that’s all an iPad (or phone, or other mobile device of your choice) is capable of then you’re not keeping up (they can do 4k video editing just fine already for example - have done so for 3+ years now).
It isn’t just apple marketing - the processors in the iPad TODAY are more capable than the mass market laptops that most people buy. Sure an i7 is faster or whatever but they’re not the volume of the market. My iPad Pro from 2017 performs better in a lot of apps than my 2020 MacBook Air i7. It’s certainly quieter.
And that’s today. Intel is going nowhere. Apple and other ARM vendors are seeing 30-100% gains per year for the past decade - in far less power.
We’re at an inflection point. The next 5 years is (for mobile) exactly where the PC market was in the late 70s/early 80s - just about at the point where it is ready to take over from mainframe - and also to expand into a much larger demographic of people (those who had no use for mainframe apps).
The PC today is the mainframe. Bulky, cumbersome, bound to a desk, and not suitable for what the majority of users actually want.
See, that’s not just what cloud is about.
If I want 2000 cores to say - crunch numbers real fast, for a day, once a month (e.g., I have some important business intelligence data I NEED to process ASAP once it comes in) - I can either buy a 2000 core cluster at millions of dollars (massive capex for stuff I won’t use 90% of the time), or I can rent it - and it becomes operational expense (that I can turn off and stop paying at any point) that I don’t need to raise a capex for and depreciate over 3, 5, or 10 years.
This is the advantage of cloud - I can scale compute capacity as and when required. Yes, its sometimes “cheaper” (and sometimes it seems so but you’re maybe comparing bananas to pears) to buy your own hardware, but you just can’t scale as quickly - lead time if I need to double compute in my cluster for example is months - chasing quotes, getting CAPEX approval, raising purchase orders, waiting for gear to arrive, etc.
Cloud? Adjust size of VM, reboot. Done. Sometimes not even that (e.g., trigger based apps; you pay only for the time your code runs, and it can scale as required).
You simply can’t do those things with your own gear.
And as to “monthly fees” - most businesses will be “charging” you a “monthly fee” internally for your division’s budget based on the depreciation of the gear you bought (i.e., accounts buy the thing, its meant to last 5 years so every month for 5 years, 1/60th of the purchase cost is taken out of your budget). You’ll be paying software licenses, storage costs, power, cooling, etc. You don’t escape “monthly” costs just because you run your own gear.
I’m not talking about home use here - I’m talking about enterprise.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Data sovereignty - I get it. I try to keep my personal data to myself as well. But if you’re bringing monthly fees into the argument as a reason to not use cloud… as above, it’s not that straightforward, especially for businesses where budgets, purchasing processes and tax/shareholder value implications are involved.
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