Cloud computing and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) may seem like something only for the IT guys to get excited about, but the ultimate benefit is accruing to ordinary users. While most day-to-day non-tech folks don’t understand the inner workings of PaaS (nor should they have to), this disruptive system is bringing in changes that are on the same scale as the early shift from command-line to GUI.
In the 1996 documentary, “Triumph of the Nerds,” Steve Jobs described his early vision to take the desktop to the masses: “It was very clear to me that while there were a bunch of hardware hobbyists that could assemble their own computers… for every one of those, there were a thousand people that couldn’t do that, but wanted to mess around with programming – software hobbyists.” Steve Jobs was a visionary. He knew that his computer needed a graphical, easy-to-use operating system so that millions of non-tech people could use it. Then, operating systems offered by Apple and Microsoft, and easy-to-use tools like VisiCalc and later MS Access brought personal computing to the masses.