Grid computing with a twist

Is funny how the IT industry goes in circles or better put it goes into a spiral. In the 70s you had only a dumb text terminal, and you could connect to an IBM mainframe and pay for the time you spent using that mainframe. In the 80s you removed your connection from the mainframe and start to use text based applications on your PC. In the early 90s you used GUI based applications on your PC. In the late 90s you used client-server applications, usually having a fat client on your PC

At the beginning of this new century ( this does sound funny ), you are using server based applications (mainframe based ) using a thin client (your web browser) and all the time complaining why you don’t have access to your data when you are offline
This year Amazon launched EC2 and S3 . First one provides computing power on demand. You can make available to your clients as many application servers as you need. The second one provides unlimited storage.
Putting things in perspective and somehow closing the circle, now if a startup wants to provide you with access to their application servers, that startup can pay per hour, per GB stored, per GB transferred towards Amazon.
Nice business model I might say.
But what happens when Amazon needs to scale their servers and storage facilities to support a big demand from their customers?
Now SUN enters the scene with their project blackbox . They can have a reasonable datacenter in place in hours instead of days. And btw Sun provides some grid computing software also (see Sun grid ), but the way they are selling their capabilities is less than ideal at the moment. And also it seems to me that their capabilities are below Amazon capabilities at the moment.
The big question are:
Is Google or Microsoft able to come up with some grid computing software and business model which will throw Amazon and Sun from the market?
Or we are going to end up with Google buying Amazon and forming Googlezon, but not for the reasons from the last year flash movie?
Or are we going to end up with Google aquiring Sun and again throwing Amazon from the market?

No matter what will happen, is clear that the platform for the next killer application is here. And right now everybody from a single guy in Romania to a big corporation in US have almost the same chances to succeed. The services that Amazon provides are ideal for a startup. I don’t know at this stage if when a company grows should still use Amazon infrastructure or start creating their own but I am going to find out I presume in the relatively near future

And when i think of Cell processor, and the new G80 GPU from Nvidia or the AMD & ATI and their CPUs, GPUs and Hypertransport, I can’t imagine yet what kind of applications are going to be available which could use properly the amount of power available in the near future on the desktop. And the IT spiral will continue.

PS Another interesting question is why we are not able to break free from this paradigm (spiral) Server, Client and then back to Server but at a different level.

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