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Comment by spolsky-wisdom | Hacker News Reader

Joel Spolsky wrote about this quite a few times, Architecture astronauts take over

"What is it going to take for you to get the message that customers don’t want the things that architecture astronauts just love to build. The people? They love twitter. And flickr and delicious and picasa and tripit and ebay and a million other fun things, which they do want, and this so called synchronization problem is just not an actual problem, it’s a fun programming exercise that you’re doing because it’s just hard enough to be interesting but not so hard that you can’t figure it out."

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/05/01/architecture-astro...

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On the one hand I usually love to drop in a bit of spolsky wisdom myself, and that quote stands well on its own, but the article itself is unfortunately marred by the fact the Microsoft products mentioned were just unsuccessful early attempts at iCloud and Google Accounts, both of which have since seen considerable "killer app" level success. I guess easy with hindsight to say "ah yes, but smartphones".

And the return to timesharing systems.

Is that a everything-new-is-old description for cloud offerings?

I once saw a fascinating quote that went something like the following:

"As computing technology develops it becomes more efficient to take centralised computing resources and distribute them closer to the user. As network technology develops it becomes more efficient to centralise them again. Further advances redistribute and yet further advances recentralise. This pattern has been noticed several times in the history of computation."

And the most fascinating thing was that it was from decades ago, perhaps even 1960! I've never been able to find the quote again. Does anyone recognise it? Perhaps I imagined it.

I dont know the exact quoter but the phenomena has been noticed and commented on maaaany times; I remember reading dilbert jokes about it in the 90s.

Can you give examples of "Further advances redistribute"?

Also, I wonder if commodity cloud offerings such as AWS will change this?

Mainframes -> home pcs -> laptop -> smartphone, all advances miniaturizing and distributing computing closer to the edge

Relevant piece of history on timesharing in relation to cloud computing by the legend that is Brian Kernighan:

https://youtu.be/O9upVbGSBFo?t=340 (05:40 - 10:50)

Indeed, with the browser being a replacement for XWindows, RDP and even SSH/Telnet.

You mean the thing that is literally just managed hosting rebranded with new shiny?

> paying untenable salaries to kids with more ultimate frisbee experience than Python, whose main job will be to play foosball in the googleplex and walk around trying to get someone…anyone…to come see the demo code they’ve just written with their “20% time,” doing some kind of, let me guess, cloud-based synchronization… between Microsoft and Google the starting salary for a smart CS grad is inching dangerously close to six figures and these smart kids, the cream of our universities, are working on hopeless and useless architecture astronomy because these companies are like cancers, driven to grow at all cost,

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