It'll never take off. Even if people want to use it, which seems doubtful, there's no way it can ever be economical at scale. Where's the value prop here?
1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting a server setup, installing Xen, and then rolling out your own VMs that way. From Windows or Mac, these VMs could then be accessed over SSH.
2. It doesn't actually replace a dedicated server. This does not solve the connectivity issue.
3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
Let's look at some August 24, 2006 posts from the peanut gallery...
Here's a skeptical comment[1] from Slashdot that was scored by that community as "5:Insightful":
>"Sun's grid effort has pretty much laid an egg. Perhaps I have the economics wrong, but isn't it more cost effective to build your own cluster out of discarded PCs?"
As counterpoint, here's a positive comment[2] to that same announcement that was more enthusiastic about the possibilities:
>Jeremy Wright • 10 years ago: Holy @#$@... We were about to move to Rackspace mainly for uptime support.
If you take Jeremy Wright's research into the new economics of cloud computing and multiply it by a hundred thousand like-minded people, you can trace a direct line from that kind of post to the Rackspace sale to private equity that made the HN front page yesterday[3]. The seeds of Rackspace's sale 10 years later were sowed from the very moment of Amazon's EC2 beta announcement.
