The Third Wave
We're on the threshold of a concept called the "Third Wave of Computing". This term was one I first heard coined about 4 years ago, which describes the state of computing power. I first heard this when the CEO of the hosting company which employed me used the term in describing the vast opportunity for the Web Hosting industry; However, the third wave is coming in a way that my CEO didn't envision. Let me explain:
The First Wave was the idea of centralized, mainframe computing power. Computers were large, expensive, and centralized. I remember as a kid going to my Step-Dad's hospital and working on a mainframe terminal there. I still remember the Textual User Interface and the green-on-black monitor of that console, exploring the different menu options to see where they would take me. My Dad described the terminal as being just an interface to a large computer in the basement of the Hospital. This mainframe gave some basic computing and word-processing capabilities to the doctors and hospital staff.
The Second Wave of computing is the concept of distributed computing, or Personal Computers. This wave intersected with the First Wave when I was a child, but with the dawn of the Personal Computer, the power of computing was brought to a whole new level. Now business other than large hospitals, universities, banks, or corporations could leverage the advantages of personal computers. The first personal computer my family had was purchased when I was 8, and was a Commodore 64. This was one of a handful of pre-PC personal computers, which had very basic computing capabilities which could be augmented by rudimentary add-on components such as printers, tape drives, floppy drives, or even a very small hard drive. The commodore we had at home had a printer and a floppy drive, but like most, didn't have a hard drive. The 2nd wave truly began when the PC became widely available. My family bought a home PC labeled an "IBM Clone", with 2 20 MB hard drives and 2 MB RAM, powered by MS-DOS. For the first time, I could run a program and keep associated data on the hard drives of the machine. Where businesses used to have to have an expensive mainframe to take advantage of computing, now even small businesses could participate.
The Third Wave is a term which describes computing power moved to the network. The power of computing over the network first began to take form with the introduction of the Internet to the public. Over the years, the infrastructure and enabling technologies have advanced to create a broad electronic "ecosystem" enabling people and computers to interact in ways that expanded the power of computing exponentially. The key to the third wave of computing is the "people" part of the technical equation. The network-based computing in and of itself is only the enabler, but once you get people involved, amazing things can happen.
There are multiple pieces of evidence suggesting that the third wave is successfully exploding into the mainstream. Online gaming has become a huge industry, with tens of millions of registered online gamers. Today's teenagers aren't as likely to use the phone as they are to utilize online chatting and IM technologies. Now, service oriented architectures such as Microsoft's Sender Connection Framework are going to bring this third wave even more into the mainstream of public consumption. As services oriented architectures are built, this allows application and component vendors to create services which subscribe to the overall architecture, seamlessly integrating what are today thought of as separate components of entertainment, information, and e-commerce. One simple example is to IM through your television to your friends and show them a blip of what you're watching. The television at home will be more like a computer, and will become even more a two-way communications device than a one-way receiver. Through the third wave, the masses will adopt computing without even realizing that they are using a computer.
Who will the big players be as this third wave begins to expand? Will web hosting companies evolve to host applications on the SOA layer, taking advantage of this inertia? Web hosting will always be a niche in the third wave, but there is so much more potential than just the hosting niche! The hosting companies who crack the code of integration with the third wave are going to be the top players in the years to come.
