The days of dedicated servers are winding down.  Sometime in the next 10 years, there will only be main two types of servers:  those which exist as virtual servers in the cloud, and personal servers.  Services like Amazon EC2 which offer pay-as-you-go server time are going to completely change the face of hosting and how we look at servers.  When it only costs $70 a month for a dedicated virtual server with fantastic connectivity around the clock, and you can turn them on and off as needed, why would you want to mess with hardware?

This is also going to be the nail in the coffin for Microsoft unless they start giving away Windows servers or something.  The fact that I can't create a cloud of Windows servers to run my app is definitely outweighing any benefits to developing for Microsoft to me right now.  I love the .NET framework, but the barriers to entry are dropping left and right for the opposition.  Time to wake up and do something, Microsoft.

Part of the 60 Ideas in 60 Days series.