"In the future, being a developer on someone's platform will mean being hosted on their infrastructure."
What about Moore's law, though? In 20 years one might be able to buy a PC with the calculating capacity of Google's whole server farm for a couple of thousand bucks...
You are correct that Moores law helps but only to a point. It's not computer processing power that is the bottleneck at the moment. It's the telephone companies and Internet access. The ability to push that data around the Internet. What we all need (idealistically) is our own feed, independent of the monopoly that currently exists.
I happened to be listening to a Brewster Kayle talk on this particular problem (ITConversations ITC-400, Universal Access to All Knowledge, 1Hr38m, 45Mb, 2004DEC16 ~ http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail400.html ) and he goes into great detail explaining the problems with physical distribution of information via networks.
What about Moore's law, though? In 20 years one might be able to buy a PC with the calculating capacity of Google's whole server farm for a couple of thousand bucks...