The Growth of the Web

The growth of the Internet is other key breakthrough in the area of treating computing as a service and utility as opposed to an infrastructure investment. Once again, there are several reasons for this. The Internet provides:

• a large, cost-effective network.

• a delivery mechanism to deliver information to people anywhere.

• a delivery mechanism to deliver computing power to people anywhere.

The last two points are perhaps the deepest and most critical. The idea of the improved networking ability to provide a delivery mechanism allows a user to do more and more tasks that are not connected with the box sitting on his or her desktop. This in turn enables people to look at computing as a service (What can I do online to get a project completed?) as opposed to a capital investment (a bigger box on a desk). This idea is enhanced by the fact that an Itanium-based system can run the three major operating systems on the same platform and still deliver great performance.

In short, the growth of the Internet showed that PCs suffer from serious limitations. A personal computer can hold only so much data and so much memory, and if you really want to access more information, it is now impossible to do so without a network connection. The connection allows you to access information that simply can't be stored on a PC and allows you to interface with larger databases and more complex applications.