Thanks to the thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable laid during the late 1990s, the speed of computer networks has finally caught up to the speed of computer processors.
Thanks to the virtual desktop they developed, the PC quickly replaced the mainframe as the center of corporate computing and began showing up in homes across America.
Before long, companies began building intraoffice networks so that their employees could run programs like Microsoft Word and Excel on their PCs, and also access programs, files, and printers from a central server.
This model was far from perfect.
Due to a lack of standards in computing hardware and software, competing products were rarely compatible -- making PC networks far more inefficient than their mainframe predecessors.
In fact, most servers ended up being used as single-purpose machines that ran a single software application or database.
And every time a company needed to add a new application, it was forced to expand its data centers, replace or reprogram old systems, and hire IT technicians to keep everything running.
As a result, global IT spending jumped from under $100 billion a year in the early 1970s to over $1 trillion a year by the turn of the century.
IT-consulting firm IDC reports that every dollar a company spends on a Microsoft product results in an additional $8 of IT expenses.
And one IT expert admits, "Trillions of dollars that companies have invested into information technology have gone to waste."
Yet, companies have had no choice but to run these obscenely expensive and highly inefficient networks.
But that's all about to change...
And that's precisely why the two words "cloud computing" scare the hell out of Bill Gates.
You see, he realizes that thanks to the thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable laid during the late 1990s, the speed of computer networks has finally caught up to the speed of computer processors.
As IT expert Nicholas Carr explains, "What the fiber-optic Internet does for computing is exactly what the alternating-current network did for electricity."
Suddenly, computers that were once incompatible and isolated are now linked in a giant network, or "cloud."
As a result, computing is fast becoming a utility in much the same way that electricity did...
Think back a few years -- any time you wanted to type a letter, create a spreadsheet, edit a photo, or play a game, you had to go to the store, buy the software, and install it on your computer.
But nowadays, if you want to look at pictures on Facebook... find directions on MapQuest... watch a video on YouTube... or sell furniture on Craigslist... all you really need is an Internet connection.
Because although these activities require you to use your PC, none of the content you are accessing or the applications you are running are actually stored on your computer -- instead they're stored at a giant data center somewhere in the "cloud."
The Economist claims, "As computing moves online, the sources of power and money will increasingly be enormous 'computing clouds.'"
David Hamilton of the Financial Post says this technology "has the potential to shower billions in revenues on companies that embrace it."
And Nicholas Carr, former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, has even written an entire book on the subject, titled The Big Switch. In it, he asserts: "The PC age is giving way to a new era: the utility age."
He goes on to make this prediction: "Rendered obsolete, the traditional PC is replaced by a simple terminal -- a "thin client" that's little more than a monitor hooked up to the Internet."
While that may sound far-fetched, in the corporate market, sales of these "thin clients" have been growing at over 20% per year -- far outpacing that of PCs.
According to market-research firm IDC, the U.S. is now home to more than 7,000 data centers just like the one constructed on the banks of the Columbia River in 2005.
And the number of servers operating within these massive data centers is expected to grow to nearly 16 million by the end of 2010 -- that's three times as many as a decade ago
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With the latest technologies, the PC can now replace our DVD player, Bluray player and CD player. We can even go beyond the present 1080p constraints; play different media formats (DIVx, RMV, MP3 etc); upscale DVD from 480i to 1080i; do HD video editing; run Photoshop; or do gaming. Plus of course, all the things you do with your current PC. And now in 2010 with the release of AMD's new 3D graphics card, we can watch 3D movies and play 3D games.
