PBS | I, Cringely . May 12, 2005 – Inflection Point:
So Apple takes over video and movies while Yahoo threatens
with a low-priced music subscription service and Google
threatens to take control of, well, everything.And Microsoft? Microsoft kicks the dog.
Sometimes I wonder if Cringely knows what he’s talking about. Surely he knows that the power of a modern PC doesn’t really have any effect on fetching web pages: the rendering engines and ever-complicated styles are a big part of what the PC does. What a reverse cache does is minimize latency, as he points out: if the entire web is no further away than my local drive, of course, it will seem pretty snappy. But I doubt you could tell the difference between a 1GHz CPU and a 3GHz CPU, given the effects of the cache.
But that aside, it will be interesting to see if any of what he projects comes to pass. This new world when the costs of delivering information — from movies to music to phone conversations — approach zero bears watching.
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