KK,
Thanks for the great read.
Much of it fits with what little I know about Apple and MS.
For example, Apple's Steve Jobs and Oracle's Larry Ellison have been fairly tight in the past. Ellison always liked the Client-Server model, with the idea that the big mainframes and everything in between would be running his software to manage the big network beast, but the little clients would not have so much control. Do you all remember that Ellison wanted to bring out that under 100-dollar set top box thingy? Not too much horsepower in the users' hands. And it sorta flopped.
Gates OTOH, was more of a distributed processing guy, with every box being able to do its own thing. Gates admitted that the internet taking off caught him by surprise.
But Jobs, now Jobs seems to straddle both these very different worlds with ease. He's got the iTunes thing which fits more with the Ellison "big server in the sky" model, and he's got his own server products and whatnot, but he's also got all this distributed processing stuff going on as well. Apple is in a great position to do something great. Whether they do it or not, who knows?
I suspect that people will still want some of both, they'll want that big server in the sky and the on-demand stuff, but they will also still want to own stuff, they will still want to manipulate stuff in their own creative way. We see that now, right?
Bill's right, no moving parts would be better for storage.
My biggest fear is that sound quality will take a back seat to the video side in all the data compression schemes. OTOH, great pictures without great sound just sucks. I'm hopeful, but I dunno. I just dunno.
KK, that article was certainly thought-provoking, thanks again for posting it and sharing it with us.