By Debra Littlejohn Shinder.
Circles and cycles – it's the way of the world, and
everyone from Willie Nelson to Walt Disney has paid homage to it.
The computer industry hasn't been around as long as the lion
kings or the relationship dilemmas posed in the redheaded
stranger's album, but the tech sector is now mature enough that
it has seen trends come and go – and come again. Even those
trends that seem "new and revolutionary" often turn out
to be simply a repackaged form of what came before, just as one
generation's "short shorts" emulate a previous
generation's "hot pants."
Consider the cloud. What a radical and innovative idea it was:
instead of saving our data and running our applications from a
local computer or a server housed in an on-premises data center, we
could take advantage of economies of scale by using lower-powered
devices to access those resources that are actually located on
larger, more powerful systems in a remote place. To those of
us who
