The emperor's new clothes

As with fashion, it sometimes feels like history repeats itself in our industry as well. It seems that we have come full circle with how software should be architected. I guess this comes from having pretty much the same goal; software solutions that are available to a lot of users and keep the data as updated as possible for all users. What this means is that we probably want to have a shared data source from where all clients can get their data. It also means that we need some kind of network connection for the clients to connect to the centralized data source. The clients are typically distributed across multiple offices, maybe even different geo-locations. With different geo-locations often comes the challenge of different network types and bandwidth.