Tom Hula wrote:
>
> Thanks for the well-reasoned insightful article.  It does seem obvious,
> if you think about it, that the days of the stand-alone do anything PC
> are numbered.  PC software companies that aren't prepared to port over
> to some sort of server platform will be in a world of hurt.  Actually,
> you already see it happening.  Many of the stand-alone applications
> (like encyclopaedias, for instance) already have on-line server
> versions.  Now if the speed and availability of the on-line software
> is improved, there will be no reason to buy a separate piece of PC
> software to do what is just as easy on-line.
>
I trend here, yes, but I have seen the centralized vs
decentralized
paradigm shift too many times to believe it will not shift again.

I have too many things on my desktop that are too handy and cheap
for
me to want to do them on line.  Besides the obvious, word
processing
and spread sheet, they include:

1.  Accounting.
2.  Legal documents.
3.  Games.
4.  Compilers.
5.  Specialized analysis programs.

Included are Internet related programs that are fairly complex.

So, I would agree that connection to the Internet is vital for
most
subsystems, but I do not see this as significant down sizing of
desk top computing power until the "information utility" is a lot
more robust, if ever.  We will still need powerful PC's to obtain
good graphics.  So OK, we won't need as much disk apace, but we
will
want bigger, more powerful displays and, which implies better,
faster
video cards.  Not a big change in PC power requirements.

I will bet that most of us will have amore powerful PC's on our
desks
in the next few years.

Regards,

Nick D.