> Could the "grid" of the Net, cloud and mobile devices evolve to the point where the existing PC and server markets retreats in relative scale into "heavy industrial" applications like cloud infrastructure, and shift out Intel's cash flow from under them?
It could, but the extractable rents of centralized data (eg. the Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits) will continue to push against this for a while yet.
Arguably, the hardware and connectivity we have now is already more than capable of dispensing with data centralization for most use-cases, relegating the cloud to niches like commodity backup-and-restore services, and premium on-demand compute capacity analogous to the use-cases for supercomputers (of which AI/ML is a growing subset).
We're already hitting use-cases and scenarios where centralized synchronization is becoming a hindrance that imposes additional costs, but the loss of control of a locus for extracting attractive profit margins implied by alternative software architectures generally limit investment.
It could, but the extractable rents of centralized data (eg. the Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits) will continue to push against this for a while yet.
Arguably, the hardware and connectivity we have now is already more than capable of dispensing with data centralization for most use-cases, relegating the cloud to niches like commodity backup-and-restore services, and premium on-demand compute capacity analogous to the use-cases for supercomputers (of which AI/ML is a growing subset).
We're already hitting use-cases and scenarios where centralized synchronization is becoming a hindrance that imposes additional costs, but the loss of control of a locus for extracting attractive profit margins implied by alternative software architectures generally limit investment.