Submitted by Mahdi Shahtalebi on Sat, 04/07/2012 - 13:52
Major technology platforms tend to last about 25 to 30 years. This gives them time to gather sufficient developer momentum, enable a set of transformational ideas, build those ideas, and form a large industry around it. The platforms then sustain for an additional 5-10 years due to inertia and lock-in. Finally, when the shortcomings of the old platform become too much to bear — as with the Mainframe, Hierarchical Databases, and more recently the PC — a new platform emerges to take the old platform’s place and bring the future forward.
