Are you willing to hedge cloud futures for your startup?

[wmf]

http://blogs.sun.com/simons/entry/the_future_of_cloud_computing

[eru]

If there is a scarcity -- someone will start cloud@home and pay people a few cents for their computer hours. Supply should be quite elastic.

[wmf → eru]

Compute time on random home PCs is essentially worthless, or at least worth less than the overhead cost of managing it. And for many users the cloud is about storage and bandwidth as much as about compute.

[notauser → wmf]

Really? What about the WoW patch downloader, which saves Blizzard a fortune and requires essentially no incremental management effort? (A modified version of BitTorrent.)

Latency is high, and individual input is low, but for simple applications that may be all you actually need.

[wmf → notauser]

There are specific cases where P2P works. I view clouds as generic infrastructure which is much more difficult to replace with P2P.