Comment by cduzz
7 hours ago
This is actually what happens.
I run my word processing software on my apple 2 (a total joke of a computer) instead of running it on the WANG.
I run my book keeping software on visicalc instead of the IBM.
I run my simulation software on my IBM PC (I even paid for the 8087!) instead of the VAX.
Moore's law has, at least so far, allowed the pioneers with toy computers to grow their toys big enough to solve "big boy" problems after some time has allowed the toy computers to be faster and the pioneers have scaled their crappy home-grown solution to solve their 60% of the problem that was originally solved by some enormous complex system.
Eventually the toy infrastructure gets expensive and solves 90-120% of the "big iron" problem space, but it also grows to cost as much as the big iron solution, but then a new generation of toy software and toy systems emerges to disrupt the "big iron" systems.
See also http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/W/wheel-of-reincarnation.htm...
You're right Moore's law has been holding up, but will hit a hard limit on process node size, so all scaling will be based on multiple cores. OTH, computing per watt spent has been plateauing. If the future bottlenecks are energy and cooling, that will require infrastructure-scale solutions. My bet is this is going to be real AI company moat.
https://www.riq.net.br/pub/computing-scaling/
Under appreciated requirement for this to work in post-cloud times: open source
If a vendor can SaaS a solution, then enterprise is generally happy (they don't want to have to hire folks for maintenance), and that completely locks out any ability to run locally.
Between enterprise's ambivalence and the obvious financial incentive to vendors, you get SaaS-only products.