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Today's Netflix announcement with Roku about a new way to get movies from the net directly to your TV screen and bypassing the computer screen in your home office, is cool for a number of reasons.
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AP |
Sure the news popped Netflix shares in a big way before they settled back at the end of the day, but the story goes much deeper. It speaks to a massive trend gripping technology nowadays, and it's being embraced by Apple [AAPL
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], Google [GOOG
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], Yahoo [YHOO
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], Microsoft [MSFT
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], Oracle [ORCL
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], Cisco [CSCO
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], Intel [INTC
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], VMWare [VMW
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], and just about every other major player in tech. Netflix's announcement is a different spin on the concept of "cloud computing," that lofty idea of everything you'd ever want or need stored on a computer network or server elsewhere instead of on a drive inside your own computer.
The personal computer is "personal" no more. More like a vessel into a different, though parallel, plane. It harkens back to the glory days of Sun Microsystems when Scott McNealy, who was way ahead of his time, kept telling us "the network is the computer." Which made infinitely more sense than Ed Zander proclaiming, later as Sun's CEO, that "we're the dot in dot com." But I digress.
From 'Mad Money' with Jim Cramer: |
Back to Netflix, and all the others. We're rapidly approaching a time when memory is becoming obsolete. Not computer memory, but ours. A time when everything we need to know is a keystroke or two away. A time when watching a movie or TV show means logging on to the net and having the material wirelessly beamed to any TV, or laptop, or handset we might have laying around. Where the net becomes a massive Tivo not just for entertainment but any kind of data. AppleTV, Sony [SNE
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], Roku, Intel, Comcast [CMCSK
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], AT&T [T
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], Time-Warner, News Corp.[NWS
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], and certainly our parent NBCUniversal and General Electric [GE
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