The Future of Software Applications
That is really the million dollar question everyone wants the answer to. Being at the right location at the right time pays off immensely especially if you are in the start-up business.
To make sense of the direction that software
The Future of Software Applications
That is really the million dollar question everyone wants the answer to. Being at the right location at the right time pays off immensely especially if you are in the start-up business.
To make sense of the direction that software is going, one needs to study the evolution of computing. Evolution in living organisms (if you remember your Biology) happens due to environmental mechanisms that favor one form vs another (aka natural selection) as well as due to small random changes to existing forms that might get passed down from one generation to another (mutation).
The analogy of software applications to living organisms breaks down at several levels including time (a few billion years vs about 50 years) but it still is a useful model to use.
Early computers were monstrous in terms of size, cost and inefficiencies. And it was almost impossible for computers to exist without an army of attendants keeping it alive. Over time, major advances in technology, the invention of the transistor, improvements in manufacturing etc made computers affordable by big corporations, most Governments, then by medium businesses and finally by almost everyone. This was the Personal Computer revolution, which wrenched computing power from huge central servers and distributed it to the hands of the individual user. For the first time, a person could do what he wished with his machine without affecting anyone else. For the first time, he needn’t get a time slot for doing computing; the computing resources were his alone, waiting for him to use. This was the Personal Computer.
The advent of the PC (and macs) lead to huge strides in computing. Users free to tinker with the hardware and software figured out innovative things to do as well as started demanding more and more from their machines; from dot matrix printers to color l