Overview

Once the general public accepted the usefulness of personal computers in the early 1980s, more and more businesses of all sizes have attempted to automate their business practices as fast as possible. The good news is that as long as the PCs stayed up and running, those businesses reaped the benefits of low-cost commodity data processing systems. The bad news is that PCs were originally designed as low-cost devices for small businesses or computer geeks who wanted to have their own computers at home. When the PC first hit the market, a typical user could have best been described as a frustrated mainframe user who did not like paying high fees for each microsecond the CPU was processing a job, especially since it seemed to always crash about halfway through the job anyway. The problem was that despite the fact that IBM delivered on the promise for independence and affordability, the PC tended to put the user on his own computing island. Across the ocean, however, the corporate data was safety protected behind the famous "glass wall" in the corporate data center, which was never particularly noted for its accessibility.

The second age of personal computing, which we are now living in, can best be recognized by the extensive real-time networking of PCs to data all over the world. Employees worldwide are networked ("chained," as some people like to put it) to their corporate data centers from their desks, their home offices, and even the wireless PALM Pilots in...