"The Network is the Computer"

Unfortunately, some of us can remember John Gage, Sun Microsystems co-founder saying this in 1984 or so. Nearly a quarter of a century later, we still haven't fully gotten there. With the rise of peer to peer technologies, many will offer we won't need to go there. Oddly enough, and for all sorts of reasons, network-centric computing is starting to look a lot like the older client-server model many thought we were morphing beyond.

Users don't care about that, of course. What they care about is how their lives change for the better. And there now is no question but that this new age of "computing architecture" is changing things. We would argue it is for the better, though the outcome is open.

We used to talk about "the network as the computer." Today, we talk about Web 2.0, which uses the networked computing platform and adds social elements (Dion Hinchcliffe produced the graphic). In some ways, "the network as the computer" will change at least some of the methods we employ to discover and retrieve video, audio and other content.

In the enterprise space, it might simply mean the ability to access centralized databases with a Web browser as the front end. At least at first. Later, more collaborative modes will develop, where end users collectively create value and knowledge of usefulness for enterprises. The analogy is Amazon and eBay, where much of the value of the service is created by users.

Still, there are clear portents. There's salesforce.com, Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, all of which deliver computing resources and applications on a hosted basis.

What changes here is much more than the way we use computational resources. Networked computing changes what we can do with computational resources. And those new ways are going to serioiusly shake business models across media and communications.