The era of software as we know it might soon be over. Trends of the past 2 years increasingly show that no longer software would be sold separately. Instead, software and hardware would merge together, transforming into an appliance that buyers can use immediately.
The latest happening in this direction is with Oracle. Recently Oracle announced its "database machine". Being developed for three years, this machine provides out-of-the-box capability. The database machine will sell for $650,000 and store up to 168 terabytes.
What Oracle does is not totally new. Several years ago, we saw similar initiative being done by Google search. A couple of months ago, we saw innovative appliance initiatives being done by KickFire -- an innovative hardware company that embeds MySQL inside its appliance, and optimize it for massive BI processing.
Sun Microsystems is also reportedly working on an optimized machine that would run its acquired MySQL the fastest.
These are all interesting development that directs us to one conclusion: that no matter it is an opensource software or a closed proprietary software, the era of "off the shelf software" might soon be over. Software might soon attached to a machine where it would run, and software in the future most likely will increasingly re-appear as either an appliance, or as a cloud computing services that the world can purchase, or subscribe to.
Such would be one of the most important trend and development of how the economics of mobile computing, desktop computing and massive computing infrastructure might change into the future.
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