> Cynics might of course argue that we have come full circle, from thick client to cloud back to thick client, but that would miss the point of what "the edge" is all about ...
You don't have to be cynical -- merely to have either been in, or have read about, IT trends over the past few decades would suffice to understand that it's all cyclical.
The cynical observation is that fashionable management trends and/or the market's eagerness to engage in ill-considered change as a convenient substitute for thoughtful progress, manifesting as regular vacillation between a centralised and a distributed approach to compute & storage, 'keeps us all in jobs'.
It doesn't necessarily have to be due to an ill-decision; thick/thin client cycling can be seen as the obvious result of network/compute cost effectiveness ration swapping. When network is cheaper, thin clients make more sense; when compute is cheaper, then it makes more sense to have it local, and thus thick clients.
And due to diminishing returns + economies of the scale, as the market starts investing in one, the other side starts to make more sense..
You may be right, but I'm wary of the implication that 'the market' is rational.
Also, if the market leans more towards network or compute (I'm not sure that's a useful distinction, but I'll run with it for now) wouldn't the economies of scale necessarily continue to accentuate the initial trend, rather than induce an oscillating pattern?
Data likes to accrete, almost as if it has its own virtual gravity.
Cycles oscillate some, depending on compute speed and network latency.
But there isn’t as much oscillation as people think. 80’s/90’s style non-networked personal computing was a rare exception to the usual rule of networked centralisation with smrt-ish terminal access.
Indeed. I make a point of avoiding the c-word entirely, as no two people agree on what it actually means. Plus I started my IT career maintaining a mostly leased line (point to point) network infrastructure, coming into mainframes via FEPs.
The applications delivered by those systems, traversing low-speed (9600bps) links over many hundreds of kilometres felt (and probably were) more responsive than the HTTP-based applications that have, 30 years later, mostly replaced them. Soon after that there was the trend to distribute file & print servers to every branch office, and maintain a breathtakingly large library of desktop applications. A blink later and I was at a Gartner shindig in 2000 where they were convinced the Sun Ray was going to be The Next Big Thing. (It wasn't.) Rinse and repeat.
You don't have to be cynical -- merely to have either been in, or have read about, IT trends over the past few decades would suffice to understand that it's all cyclical.
The cynical observation is that fashionable management trends and/or the market's eagerness to engage in ill-considered change as a convenient substitute for thoughtful progress, manifesting as regular vacillation between a centralised and a distributed approach to compute & storage, 'keeps us all in jobs'.