Companies started using machines to process information as the twentieth century dawned. Computing became a general purpose technology. IT began to become an increasingly larger part of a company's expenditure. People who could operate them became a "priesthood of technicians".
Minicomputers arrived when Mainframes were dominating the market but didn't supplant them. They supplemented the bigger, more powerful machines and expanded the use of computers in businesses. It was the PC that upended the industry.
It democratized computing and made it more personal, but also made computing extremely inefficient. These single purpose systems resulted in very low levels of capital utilization. This is not just about computers being idle most of the time, it is also because of identical IT systems employed and maintained at almost every company. Companies like Microsoft, HP and Dell have fed over the complexity and inefficiency of this model.
Earlier attempts at providing computing as a utility had limited success because of insufficient network bandwidths. Now that the network barriers are collapsing, the PC age is giving way to the utility age.
The Big Switch: Our New Digital Destiny By Nicholas Carr
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