Hardware Always Beats Software in the End
Reading about Mowser’s demise (I sat in on a few mobile search meetings with Russell Beattie at Yahoo! a couple years ago), it reminded me that everytime smart people try to invent ways to deal with hardware limitations with software (like Mowser tried to do by smartly converting regular web pages into mobile web pages), they are burned in the end by hardware making the Moore’s Law jumps in capacity/capability that make the software solution moot. One example is all those data archiving software solutions in the 90’s which are totally useless now that you can store tetrabytes of data for $50/month. Another may be the way scaling “search” used to be trying to come up with ever-sophisticated algos for that one Sun server - while Google was just scaling with thousands and thousands of ever-more cheap Linux boxes.
