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Comment by jamesbrady | Hacker News Reader

My view is that you probably won't see the HP/IBM/... companies enter this market as it's already commoditised (even though there's only really one player): they prefer to focus on high value, high margin products and services.

Sun is the only one in the space: http://www.sun.com/service/sungrid/index.jsp - they're currently task-centric grid computing rather than machine-centric cloud computing.

In many ways, running applications on a grid rather than machines in a cloud is a more pleasing idea, and fits better with the point I make in the post, but pragmatism wins out: the edge cases and dynamic requirements mean running virtual machines is often much more convenient.

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Actually IBM has "Blue Cloud" (it even made Techcrunch ! see http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/15/ibms-blue-cloud-is-web-...)

But you're right it's a very high-end offering, so you're not gonna' see it mentioned much in the bootstrapped startup world.

btw, when are you coming back to Hursley ? ;-)

That's interesting, I stand corrected - it is interesting how the trend has cycled between centralised and distributed compute resources over the decades, and IBM's been on the ride the whole time.

btw, when are you leaving Hursley ? ;-)

I believe it's very likely that Microsoft will announce a cloud platform this year that is similar to Google's App Engine. Sun may do the same. It would be easier for MS and Sun to support multiple programming languages because all applications would run on the JVM or the .NET framework.

Yes, of all of those guys, I think Microsoft are most likely next to act, as it would also be the perfect opportunity for them to offer any cloud-based Office products they may or may not be developing :)

Suns Jini+JavaSpaces was good a few years ago. Was sad to see them drop it though.

Can you talk more about the edge cases and problems/solutions in your next blogs?

It's unfortunate, too, since many of the small guys that will use EC2 to scale will eventually need enterprise-level help in the future.

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