We are virtualising hardware the same way we started digitising information years ago when the web came about. Yet a lot of us are missing the point.

Let’s look at the very basics of the web

Books, video, audio - all forms of physical data carriers were transformed into bytes that are easily accessible, transferable and reproducible. If I want to create a web page, I define it declaratively using HTML. I describe all text and images that make up my page and then I let the browser render that. I can then start serving that HTML page to the rest of the world and people’s browsers will render it in the exact same way. The browser parses the HTML and creates all headings, paragraphs, links etc.

Take HTML out of that picture for a moment. On one end it’s me with my web page - at the other end are myriads of users with browsers that have internal APIs for rendering headings, paragraphs...