If the mountain won't come to M... (Score 1)

This pidgeon-holing of distributed computing (ie. Grid) technologies is flawed thinking - and it would be a worry if IBM and Microsoft have built their "the future is web-services" strategies solely on this type of analysis. What the analysis forgets is that you have to get the data INTO the database before you can compute with it. For many processing tasks, it makes more sense to send the bulk of processing to the data rather than the other way round. The barriers to achieving this aren't in the economies, they're in the architecture of current databases. If you extend this thinking to data in a more general sense you'd have to conclude that file sharing networks aren't efficient ... and neither is the world wide web.