In your response-

Discussion 1 Leadership springs from within.

Discussion #2 Pro's for the following response;

Hardware may have been a traditional driver of the acquisition process in the IT industry, but developments in business practices and innovation have led software to become the motivating force for buying decisions. As hardware vendors have increasingly lost their monopoly on endpoints and more offerings have moved to a virtualized environment or the cloud, decisions about software are the new catalyst for business.

Cloud platforms such as AWS and Azure have increased offerings to the point where you can them host your entire Infrastructure, a Platform, or just Software as a Service in their remote environment. Moreover, businesses are feeling increased pressure to keep up with the latest versions of software to maintain their competitive advantage, updating their software much more often than their hardware.

Cloud offerings and virtualization platforms cater to this desire, and many industries are moving away from traditional thick clients to thin or even zero clients. These trends are likely to continue, and will only further emphasis on software.

Respond to the following;

I agree, thin client and updates are more so than hardware. Example, the IPhone has not really changed it's hardware in but once in about 10 years, from the old boxy phone to the new larger rounded and smoothed phone, smaller or larger. Either way the software updates are almost daily, it seems.

In another example, let's look at Elon Musk and Tesla and Space X. Their hardware has to update. The amount of data their hardware processes is ridiculously incomprehensible. The hardware has to keep up with that immense data processing with the increase and ever evolving software. That's a situation where we can also analyze this by looking at where the money is. Even if it is all from one person. HAHAH. What do other people think?

Respond to the following;

Continuing on the topic of smart phones, I agree that the design hasn't changed much since inception. They are the same rectangular shapes and now with some edge screens. However, usb ports and standards have changed over the years. I know this is not an explicit driver of buyer demands and has been a costly and painful upgrades for people as their cords get outdated.

Yet, this has seen vast improvements over the years. What are some very important things for users today: transfer rate, and fast charging of phones. USB 2.0 offered 480 Mbit/s transfer rate and now USB 3.2 offers 20 Gbit/s. USB-C is bi-directional which means it can charge in either direction. This is not a visually "shiny" improvements to the users, but this has been very important and essential steps forward.