It's been at least eight years since microchip gurus noted the growing gap between multi-thread hardware and single-thread tasks. Vendors who've taken the lead in the drive toward hardware parallelism are now looking for ways to bring software developers into alignment with what that technology enables. There are already definite danger signs of diminishing, or even negative, returns.

Experts like AMD Senior Fellow Chuck Moore suggest that future development must move upward into the level of the API rather than the instruction set, which is certainly not news to the Force.com developer. The PaaS development community is living that future today.

Force.com developers, I suggest, are already giving the lie to anyone who says that "What we don't have yet is that combination of a new business model and a killer application that will make parallel processing the household name that the Internet has become. I'm not sure we're going to see one." The business model is PaaS, and the killer application is Development as a Service.

As William Gibson has famously said, "The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed." Developing on Force.com gives developers more than their share, and I'm just fine with that.