To Control or Not

There is a battle that has raged in IT since the beginning, still being fought today. It is the philosophical battle of where best to control computers.

Somewhere out there, the warring nations of "Authoritarian Centralization" and "Freedom For Computers" battle daily in heroic deeds that go almost unnoticed.

Yet these battles for the mindset of the programming community have huge ramifications on how we use our talents and what we can produce.

For a number of years, following the crushing of the Client/Server rebellion, the Centralization people have had a good time, the web was good to them. But now the pendulum seems to be sweeping the other way. More and more we are seeing the growth of technologies that will put the applications back on the users boxes, and the big servers will become just large data dumps.

I happen to like power in the users hands, that is the way I have programmed over the last 30 years. I liked Client/Server, it was the putzes that couldn't do it right, then Microsoft threw in the registry and no one could do it. Now .NET comes with no call on the registry at all, though stll with the stupid GAC to really mess things up if the Centralization gnomes get there way.

The sad thing is that I hate the violence of the swings. I would love it if we could find some technologic common ground and a means to maximize both the back end and the users machines. Afterall, a Dual Core 4GHz PC as a desktop or laptop is still going to whoop a 2Ghz server, and 30 or 30,000 of these laptops hitting one of these servers are going to make server performance grievous.

.NET, AJAX and Service based computing will all play a part in moving to the middle ground, but we also need technologies to counter balance this shift, or we will be off into P2P computing and angry Authoritarians again.