What are the needs of emerging small business. What impact does information technology have on this. How is balance and its impact expected to change over the next decade. Fault tolerance increases in importance as the time and space of computation grows. The dispersed or protracted computation is more likely to experience a failure.
Failure here refers to hardware faults.
In terms of software, desired attributes include usability, portability, reliability, and scalability. There has been a drift of users from supercomputers to the lower cost and increasingly powerful, higher volume computers. These computers provide user-friendly environments with a wide range of supporting packages. In addition, code which was written a decade ago for them not only still runs, but runs faster. The lower cost machines have preserved the users' time investments.