End of Software, The: Finding Security, Flexibility, and Profit in the On Demand Future

I Want It Now

In the early 1980s, the industry began a race that has accelerated over time: the automation of daily end-user business transactions. The first application that received widespread focus was the automated teller transactions that form the backbone of the instant-money machines found in virtually every bank, airport, and convenience store. In recent years, we've seen this automation trend ripple through almost every area of business, from grocery stores to gas stations. As opposed to the batch-computing model that dominated the industry in the 1960s and 1970s, this new online model of computing had relatively unsophisticated clerks and consumers directly conducting simple update transactions against an online database system. Thus, ...