The distributed computing era created as many problems as it solved, but every revolution does that. (Watch what you wish for my Canadian separatist brethren.) The distributed era killed the minicomputer in the same way the automobile killed the buggy business. The file was a new thing, one that we tried our best to make fit into our comfortable, existing world of the transaction. But we haven't truly done it justice. Instead, we built in hardware that was just smaller, dumber, cheaper versions of the big stuff we previously built. And we wondered why our lives kept getting more and more complicated.

There's a new era upon us, like it or not. The Internet computing era is dragging data into the "cloud" right along with it. You already partake in it, whether you realize it or not, and so does your company. This era will rain more files--and bigger files--down on you than you can ever imagine, causing scale dilemmas that will be almost incomprehensible. Think it's hard to deal with distributed computing issues? Just wait until 90% of your data exists in the ether and your applications execute "somewhere." This era won't go away quietly. Like K-Fed, this era is taking over for now.