back

by walrus01·27d ago·view on hn ↗
> - PCs destroyed minicomputers.

What's weird is that with "store your everything in the cloud and pay a monthly recurring subscription", we have now regressed to a 1960s/1970s timesharing revenue model for individual workstation computers.

The default new factory out of box workflow for "enrollment" in google services, iCloud or Microsoft-everything on a new ios, macos, windows or android personal computing device is clearly designed to sign people up for subscriptions.

And same general idea of "move all your servers to the cloud" recurring revenue for what is effectively the same as mainframe timesharing for key business functions, by renting VMs in GCP, Azure, AWS in perpetuity.

Yes, you can still use your desktop or laptop PC in 2026 with zero external third party subscriptions (other than maybe your residential home ISP), but how many non-tech people actually do so now?

1 comments
The cloud era seemed to start out being about availability of storage and slowly switched in big corporates to be about security and governance. The first seems stupid now considering how much local storage we have. The later might depend on what security issues crop up.