Now, we're back to centralized systems- and I couldn't believe it when I watched the shift: What first caught my attention that this could get serious was gmail. Then g-office (whatever they called it then). Meanwhile a whole host of other services started.
I was developing a desktop app because I still wasn't convinced that people wouldn't prefer having their software and data "in hand," as it were.
I expect a new advantage will emerge and we'll want our machines and data back.
Even within the current era, render on server, render on client, ajax (the mix), etc.
We're seeing it now in gaming. Vidcards are the cost of a whole system now, games have become huge, and fast storage is still expensive; but bandwidth is increasing along with A/V streaming being perfected, so someone figured out how to minimize apparent control latency and now games are streaming. Once vidcards get cheap and SSD storage capacities catch up to 150GB games it'll flip back until the balance tips again.
I wouldn’t play really competitive shooters that way but it’s low enough to not bother me even in mouse/keyboard FPS (for the PC services). For controllers it’s completely negligible, like playing with a Bluetooth device or on a 2015 TV.
That said, I’m in Santa Clara County near one of the major Shadow datacenters, probably the others too, and I have gigabit. I am in the ideal situation you describe.
So is a lot of the world though. US is super rural for its economic weight but that’s not the norm. Most developed countries have much higher density and better networks. I think we’ll probably just end up dragging behind the curve until we mesh the flyover states better.
It may not be conceptually beautiful but it is one of the most practical and useful technologies we've ever created, like C compared to lisp. The Web is the new "Worse is Better"
Emacs has been a decent haven for me in my search for privacy, interopability, programmability: my user agent.
Actually HTTP could directly handle DNS. Then you can decide between a cloudflare, google, akamai or amazon browser. Who needs more freedom if we can have security...
Ideally then for all more involved software experiences native software would have to be shipped.
Stop with this stop political stuff in tech like root level zone server type of stuff.