For CPU power, a Raspberry Pi today is faster than servers that ran whole medium to large businesses 20 years ago. Much of what people do with SaaS involves backend processes that could run on a 1990s era PC.
There are exceptions, like large AI models and huge databases like web search, though in the case of AI models I can run pretty decent ones locally already, but on an admittedly expensive laptop. If the rate at which models grow is not as fast or faster than the rate at which computers grow, mainstream PCs or even phones will catch up eventually.
I've actually wondered if that might be a major factor that swings the pendulum back... if you can run an AI that has memorized the entire Internet locally, that makes all kinds of things possible in local compute.
Installing apps could be easy, even automatic on demand. That's kind of what the web does. Imagine the web with better caching of program objects, maybe a runtime built around WASM, and an iCloud-type data model, and you can visualize personal computing for today. The kludgy idea of installers that vomit files all over the system is already legacy.
But it would still break SaaS lock-in, so this isn't where the money goes. Our software paradigms wrap themselves around whatever works as a business model.
Modern 3D games are local, so I’m not sure the point there. My point about 90s machines was that most business SaaS is not compute or data heavy unless it’s for a huge corporation.
As far as local data: my laptop has terabytes, my phone over a hundred gigabytes. I have fiber at home and have seen speeds approaching a gigabit on 5G.
It’s not that often that people sit down at entirely unfamiliar machines they’ve never used, log in, and try to do data intensive work. In that case I suppose an iCloud model of compute would be downloading a lot.
There are exceptions, like large AI models and huge databases like web search, though in the case of AI models I can run pretty decent ones locally already, but on an admittedly expensive laptop. If the rate at which models grow is not as fast or faster than the rate at which computers grow, mainstream PCs or even phones will catch up eventually.
I've actually wondered if that might be a major factor that swings the pendulum back... if you can run an AI that has memorized the entire Internet locally, that makes all kinds of things possible in local compute.
Installing apps could be easy, even automatic on demand. That's kind of what the web does. Imagine the web with better caching of program objects, maybe a runtime built around WASM, and an iCloud-type data model, and you can visualize personal computing for today. The kludgy idea of installers that vomit files all over the system is already legacy.
But it would still break SaaS lock-in, so this isn't where the money goes. Our software paradigms wrap themselves around whatever works as a business model.