the different pieces of software merge into a single application in the user’s browser, even though the programs are owned by different companies and are running on computers in many different places.

Software, Gates told his troops, was no longer something people had to install on their own computers. It was turning into a utility service

In a twist on the old agricultural practice of sharecropping, the site owners provide the digital real estate and tools, let the members do all the work, and then harvest the economic rewards.

In fact, nearly every traditional business application now has an equivalent offered over the Internet, and companies are eagerly embracing the new services.

About forty small software companies, with names like Computer Sciences Corporation, Computer Usage Company, and Computer Applications Inc., were founded during the late 1950s to write programs for mainframes.

a company only pays for the capacity it uses when it uses it.

The computers’ ability to handle transactions with unprecedented speed and accuracy forced all major financial institutions to follow in Bank of America’s footsteps.

Our PCs are turning into terminals that draw most of their power and usefulness not from what’s inside them but

Here was the first, but by no means the last, irony of electrification: even as factory jobs came to require less skill, they began to pay higher wages. And that helped set in motion one of the most important social developments of