The Network is the…
Years ago, Sun Microsystems came up with the slogan “The Network Is The Computer”. It was a great slogan for a Unix hardware company, but it didn’t apply very well to The Rest Of Us (obviously I’m thinking in slogans today). Lately, though, it’s starting to come true. Nokia just announced Ovi, which the website says is “the door to Nokia internet services.” (I don’t know any more than you do; not even what “ovi” means).
The key here is that it’s a service. This is clearly the wave of the…well, present, I guess, as well as the future. But think about it: from office applications from Google, to software setup from Microsoft, to services from Apple to Nokia to just-about-everybody, now that computing hardware (PCs, laptops, smartphones, PDAs, etc) is better and cheaper than ever, the software is sort of leaving.
I suppose there’s nothing wrong with this, although in the words of the Boston Globe (talking about Steampunk hobbyists), “there’s something vaguely alienating” about it. Services are more steps removed from me. If the hard drive in my unconnected PC crashes, it’s a problem I can work around myself. If I’m using the XYZ Corporation’s location-based spreasheet processing entertainment mashup, and something goes wrong somewhere in the network, I can at best call customer service.
The rejoinder I heard years ago to Sun’s slogan was usually something like “the network may be the computer, but the network is down!” Hmmm.
its very nice