I've been an active participant in the computer industry since 1977. This was my first every home computer. I was a kid in Australia at the time.
Computer hobbyists back then wanted a computer of their own. We had spent a lot of time being annoying participants at colleges where you could get some free access to the mainfames. I did this at a local community college, so that I could get access to the DEC PDP computer there. I learned a lot, but longed for my own machine.
I didn't realize it at the time, but I was actually part of the move to decentralize computing. Rather than the computer being a central thing that was guarded by the "Priests" of IT back then, the personal computer allowed us all to have a computer on our desk and really then learn how they worked. And that is how I started my career as a programmer. I saw opportunity in this quantum shift in technology and wanted to be a part of it. The rest is history.
Now I see this more for what it really is. The struggle of a centrally controlled environment vs. a decentralized and more freer and open environment is a battle that we've had in the world for thousands of years. This change in computing was just a synthesis of what is natural.
If a country is placed under a controlling, central government, where the people are restricted from living their lives in peace and harmony, eventually that control is seized and given back to the people. But all the time, there are those that want to seize the control back and are motivated by profit & power to do that. Little by little they achieve it until we return back to the centralized control model.
This is exactly what has played out in technology in the past 40 years or so. Consider the following timeline:
There are plenty of emerging technologies now that attempt to push software back out to the target machine to run. If you go to your local hardware store, you will likely see vendors pushing new "smart home" technologies that are basically embedded computing devices that run software locally to manage your thermostat, turn on/off your lights, etc. Everything these days seems to have a computer in it.
We seem to be returning to the decentralized state again. But maybe in a hybrid form. The thing is that small devices like phones, watches, IoT devices, etc. can do so much. Big processing power, however, is best done on the server. With that said, though, you give up the independence from the manufacturer or provider to "the cloud" which is basically their computers. Just like in the old main frame days.
The question really comes down to how much the individual consumer is willing to put up with this.
If companies are stealing consumer data and selling it, not protecting the privacy of the consumer and eventually governments step in and mandate the respect of privacy (as they have done in Europe), then the result will be that the popular products will be those that are not tethered at all to the Internet. Couple this with viruses, hacks, vulnerabilities, etc. and it is the recipe for a "revolution" in the technology space.
The first thing will be the security firms that help protect data. They are typically drive by business clients, however, so this won't be part of a consumer uprising. But maybe we will see customers returning to a more "local computer support" world, because they won't trust the big manufacturers to look after them.
Or maybe we have entered a world where the customer is so hypnotized that they are literally walking around in a coma and doing whatever the TV tells them to do. I really hope it is not the latter, but the more times that people realize that installing a "trojan horse" in their homes in the form of IoT devices, or smartwatches, or cameras that watch their every move, etc. is really not in their self interest, the more likely we may cycle this centralized control.
I believe that ultimately the power must be kept in the hands of the people. I believe this in terms of money (Bitcoin), but also technology (open source) where the individual has the right to control their own data, control their own technology and control their own money. We can use technology to create a peer to peer world where there is no need for centralized control.
The key here is to take a complex thing of decentralization and make it user friendly. Those that can make it so that it is easy for anyone to use will likely win. As long as they don't feel that they have to create a "walled garden" model in which to deploy (like Apple). The whole point is to put the power in the hands of the individual and allow them to actually benefit from it, without attempting to control it centrally. This seems alien to human nature but it is something that must be done if we are to evolve.
I believe that the advances in passionate technology are coming from the Maker movement and they will ultimately define the next chapter in technology. It isn't going to be something pushed down to us from some monolithic company. It will be the more organized garage startups but they have moved from the garage to the hackerspaces. This is where the next generation of technology will emerge.
Keep your eyes out on MakerFaires and Hackerspaces as I predict we will see decentralized computing in ways we have never expected. One example of this might just be this:
These are exciting times and I'm proud to bear witness to it.
