Came up on the recent Ben Thompson interview too where he likens current day Microsoft with IBM of the 90s.
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Cedric in the background: SELECT * FROM USERS WHERE email ILIKE '%openai%' OR first_name ilike 'sam%'…
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In the 1970s, computers were downright expensive and ridiculously unwieldy. A large computer was the size of several refrigerators! It was no wonder that only governments and businesses used them. A typical business would pay US$200,000 to US$1M for a computer system, and then hire a few programmers to write, say, payroll software — software that was built custom for the business.
If you ran a company, payroll software meant that you had to store information about your employees. It is highly likely that you would store this information in a database management system — one that you would have to purchase from an external vendor. You also would also need your payroll system to be able to organise, manage and access employee information in a handy way to carry out functions like calculating paychecks and producing tax reports.
And, now with “ai”, we get to run through all of this again. I note how the numbers have changed, but in essence this little circle seems to play out every decade or so.
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