Sun: world only needs 7 computers (and London tornado)

There's only one IT Blogwatch, in which Sun trolls blogland with a PR-stunt claim, channeling Thomas J. Watson. Not to mention the awful truth about last week's tornado in London...

Chris Mellor reports:

IBM founder Thomas J. Watson couldn't add up: it was seven computers the world would need, not five. That's the contrarian view of Sun chief technology officer Greg Papadopoulos. He thinks there will just seven hyperscale, pan-global broadband computing services giants. They will deliver computing as a service on a likely wholesale basis which smaller businesses will sub-divide, parcel up and retail to their customers. The seven hyperscale providers will be Google, Microsoft Live, Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay, Salesforce.com and the Great Computer of China.
...
He thinks the computing business tomorrow will look like the energy business today: a few global behemoths; fifty to a hundred regional and national concerns and then wildcatters and specialists. A big computer for Sun's Papa Dop is not just a few standard CPUs + RAM + SW. It's millions of servers, storage and networking nodes organised into a vast distributed cluster and functioning as a single machine. Each cluster may have 5,000 nodes.
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Engineering for hyperscale computing is unique and can't be done by lashing gazillions of cheap servers together. Power plants are not built from piles of cheap portable generators. Ergo it's going to need a Sun, an IBM, an HP, to build the hyperscale clustered blade farms that Google's peers are going to need. He wishes. Google seems to be building its own Intel-based infrastructure exactly by lashing cheap processors together in its own way. It's a place where Papa Dop's Sun doesn't shine.

Greg's post matters:

I mean "Computer" as in the "The Network is the ..." ... My point in labeling them a Computer is that there will be some organization, a corporation or government, that will ultimately control the software run on and, important to my argument below, the capitalization and economics of the global system ... Our bet (meaning Sun's) is that, like the energy, transportation, telecommunications and power utility businesses, most of these companies will realize that they can become even more efficient if they rely upon a few, highly competitive and deeply technical infrastructure suppliers.
...
The cheapest computing is not necessarily obtained by lashing together racks and racks of the cheapest computers you can find. Engineering for scale matters. Really matters.

Joel Hruska muses:

Assuming Greg’s predictions are accurate, it’ll be interesting to see how Microsoft and its competitors continue to evolve and scale their own products to ensure customers have access to these new, vastly more complex networks. Obviously Sun aims to be the premier provider of both hardware and software infrastructures, but it’s far too early to tell which of cluster computing’s major proponents will win on that score ... he doesn’t have much to say about the type of software necessary to power such an initiative.

IBM's Billy Newport:

Don't agree? Lets take most people with home computers. Do they back them up regularly? How many of them have problems with software crashing or the machine failing to the point the geek squad arrives. What a complete and utter pain in the you know where. I can't be bothered myself anymore. If I never reinstall a windows PC again then it'll be too soon. Plus, the whole upgrade debacle. Upgrade for what? Wouldn't it be easier for your computer service provider to do that for you? Absolutely ... consumers not corporations will be the main market. Mom and dad as well as they well educated sons and daughters will flock to this service as soon as they know about it.

But IBM's Gerhard Poul disagrees:

I believed that PCs might one day be a thing of the past, but I’m no longer seeing that. Today there are better reasons than ever to carry around your ThinkPads and MacBooks ... People still want to manage all their photos and have all their music on their machines. Some of them even want to edit their spreadsheets and documents while being offline and don’t want these to be copied to off-site storage for privacy reasons.

I agree with GregP that there will be a time when major players will operate a large part of the infrastructure to provide storage and processing capacity on demand, but if I look at the current trend in computer use I don’t think we’ll ever get rid of the management nightmare that is known as the PC.

...as does Sun's Joerg Moellenkamp:

I really like the presentations and talks of Greg Papadoplos, but his blog entry about "the five computing complexes" is a miss in a collection of hits by Greg. At first the internet is a collection of humans, and not a collection of consumers. It´s the old understanding of a few broadcasting companies which control the access to the communication between people. This time is long gone.

eln calls it, "Wishful thinking":

Every software company out there wants "software as a service" to become the New World Order because it represents the Holy Grail: a reliable continuous revenue stream from existing customers ... Enterprise software companies are making a huge push into this space, but I'm still not convinced that the market for it is big enough ... I think the vendors are vastly overestimating the market because they want to believe EVERYONE will jump at the chance to hand over control to the vendor.

Peter O'Kelly offers this reality check:

Perhaps every prediction can come true, if you're willing to wait long enough.

Buffer overflow:

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Previously in IT Blogwatch

• TSA threatens fake-boarding-pass guy (and scary Mary)
• Yahoo! reorgs! -- loses execs (and tubby-ATM)
• Those AMD 65nm rumors were true (and WoW noob)
• Novell likes Microsoft Open XML -- shock! (and flame fractals)
• Spies like us like blogs (and neural NOTwork)
• Older posts

And finally... Did you hear the one about the London tornado? [Too subtle? Perhaps you'll prefer this]

Richi Jennings is an independent technology and marketing consultant, specializing in email, blogging, Linux, and computer security. A 20 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. Contact Richi at blogwatch@richi.co.uk.