We are now seeing the emergence of edge services which recognize that while information and applications may not want to be free, they want to be as close to users as possible. The shift toward edge services will affect every segment of information technology, from the most stable legacy-based applications to the newest palmtop or wearable devices. It changes the business models of ISPs, network equipment providers, and application developers. It rewrites the rules governing how services are priced and delivered. And it promises to provide to users an incredible new array of new services, where information is prioritized, customized, personalized, and localized.
Television remains best at delivering content to a mass audience.
Newspapers and other forms of media also continue to thrive in far greater health than Web prognosticators had forecast. The Web was never suited to providing mass media-size scalability. But the early efforts to scale Web content actually pointed the way to the next wave of computing. The first efforts to scale Web sites, underwritten by the largest Web content providers, built a new industry, now known as Content Delivery Networking. A simple business model emerged, where CDNs provided an improved user experience for customers of the largest Web sites, and in return, those Web sites financially compensated the CDNs, based on a set of performance metrics verified by third-party Web measurement services.