Great perspective to share, thanks.

> They didn't understand horizontal scaling

What of Jini, JavaSpaces / Linda, JXTA, "grid computing"?

Were they too early? Dismissed as (Bill Joy's) hobby projects?

At the time, I was very enthusiastic. Especiall grid computing. So much so that when cloud computing arrived, I couldn't recognize the sea change. Square peg, round hole.

We even POC'd some Jini support. Demo'd for hardware manufacturers, customers, our dealer channel. Customers loved the idea.

But like UPnP, Jini failed to get traction.

As for JXTA (peer-to-peer), although I didn't gave any skin in that gane, I really expected it to vecome the norm. eg My brother (for his ISP) POC'd video delivery in anticipation. But that got mooted pretty quick.

Arguably, AWS Lambda (et al) was is "dumb" grid (run anywhere in asandbox) and the OpenClaw agentic (madness) is the "evil" incarnation. (I'm aware of efforts like Emerald AI (et al) to make a "smart" grid.)