While the technologies required to harness the Sun's abundance remain, for now, on the horizon, the means to tap the equally unbounded intellectual potential of people around the world has already been invented—particularly where software is concerned. Just as new energy technologies will cut back on—and, in time, will likely erase—the need for massive, centralized power production infrastructures, the Internet is already dissolving the requirement that software be developed at and distributed from sprawling corporate campuses.
Not surprisingly, the companies who've counted on collecting cash from every person who consumes software—chief among these being Microsoft—are regarding these changes with no small measure of discomfort. Microsoft, having amassed the means to tap the unlimited store of human knowledge in a way that hadn't been possible for just anyone to do, is watching new technologies threaten to open up those unlimited stores of power and profit to anyone.
Yet another example of Smallification.
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