In these days of virtualization, off-the-shelf hardware, and flexible infrastructure, it can be easy to forget that different types of computing jobs place different demands on software and hardware.

在大量应用虚拟化、成品硬件、灵活基础架构的今天，人们很容易忘记，不同的计算任务需要在不同的软件和硬件中实施。

youdao

Doug Cutting, then working at Yahoo, saw its potential and created Hadoop, which works with off-the-shelf hardware to manage data too big for conventional databases.

FORBES: How Hadoop Makes Short Work of Big Data

Apple thought it could design hardware and software in house and use standard off the shelf parts but that leads to copy cats because parts are parts.

FORBES: Who Has The Winning Innovation Model, Google, Apple, or Samsung?