It's kind of kooky that it's come to this, but here you have the Chief of Research at Yahoo, Prabhakar Raghavan, pointing out what science fiction writers have dreamed of for decades -- that computing, long the province of the boutique provider (the home PC) is becoming a commodity, just like the electricity that produces it.
"In a sense," says Raghavan told Businessweek, "there are only five computers on Earth."
Those five computers would be the sums of the respective server farms owned by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon and IBM.
Just as virtually no one, not even rural farmers, depends on their own generators for energy, but takes their electricity from the grid, so too will universities, businesses, and even individuals come to rely more and more on the grid -- or the "cloud" of computers out there in nowhere land -- for their processing needs.
Anyone who relies on web-based services -- e.g. Google or Yahoo mail -- is already plugged into the grid/cloud. And if "Google Office" has anything to say about it, this dependency will only intensify.
Combine cloud computing with ever faster and more ubiquitous internet access and what you've got is supercomputing for the masses -- even if it's only being used for the mundane: on-demand television, sharing our lives through Youtube and Flickr, and storing all that data we need to get our jobs done.
Kottke has more (...and he only scooped everyone else on this story by about three years.)
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