IDG Contributor Network: Amazon and Microsoft moves indicate that hardware OEMs may become obsolete
[Disclosure: Qualcomm and Microsoft are clients of the author.]
I’m at the Qualcomm 5G Summit this week and according to both them and Cisco, next year we should reach critical mass on 5G. I didn’t really think about how big a change this would be until I listened to what Qualcomm said about Microsoft’s new Surface X (upon which I’m writing this very column) and the announcement from Amazon on their new AWS Outpost initiative.
Separately these announcements are certainly interesting. Together they may mean a massive change back to something far more like the old IBM mainframe model than most of us realize. In that model, the vendor owned the entire technology stack and the user experience. In this new case, the vendors in question are cloud vendors not OEMs.