How many computers does the world need?

An interesting discovery for me today was - around 20 per cent of all the servers sold around the world each year are now being bought by a small handful of internet companies -including Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Amazon.

And all this before cloud computing as really taken off. in-Aptly said by IBM CEO in 1943 and  then aptly re-phrased by Sun Microsystems CTO in the present context - The world only needs 5 computers

The movement of 20% to 80% is where all the usage patterns and architectural patterns are going to change. As pointed out by Rashid in the FT blog - "every time there’s a transition to a new computer architecture, there’s a tendency simply to assume that existing applications will be carried over (ie, word processors in the cloud)."

A case in point to me is spreadsheets. The current-form-spreadsheet IMHO will not scale in the cloud architecture. With the massive amount of data available to business users in the cloud architecture - Datamining techniques like Clustering , Decision Trees , Network Analysis will be available as features and the current charting capabilities would really move to the world of visualization.