The key for me why this discussion opens on a attribution of the “5 Computer” quote is simply has a nice familiarity to it which can serve as a great prelude to bringing the topic of cloud computing to a broader audience. There have been plenty of instances in history where a storyline has been used to serve another end and I guess emails are best directed to Robert Wuhl when they do, at least he knows how to laugh about them.

I am more interested in the mindset required for appreciating more emergent approaches to organizing ones information rather than which four, five or six computer “clouds” dominate - I’ll let the experts and VC’s worry about that, what matters to me is discovering this stuff and when and how I will be utilizing it. I don’t want some university awarding me a PhD for technology knowledge at the end my discovery process, I simply want utilize cloud computing advantages and in the process make sure that I didn’t simply have my head in the clouds.

M.

Andrew,
Either for the enterprise side of your life or your consumer side, my model assumes two things; that there is an application cloud, and there is an ifrastructure cloud that delivers the application. So either way there is an application somebody wants to use.

The spactial data platform you have in mind, sooner or later has to deliver an application. Nobody would want a platform for its own sake. So I would focus more on what the key applications are based on the spacial data. If there are enough of them, and if they, as you say, are a superset of text, than that application would one day be positioned to knock out the consumer app cloud. Nothing happens until that does. Once that does, then, and only then, does the infrastructure to deliver it matter.

So long story short, I agree with your second statement.

You are welcome to email me at my work email, and we can talk more about these topics.

Anyway to play your game, if you see computing as clouds, I think it is pretty obvious we only need one, the internet. Isaac Asimov short story “The Last Question” published in 1956 was already establishing that. You’re just 51 years late and 4 computers over.

The global phone system (the PSTN) is also a computing cloud. It may not seem that way because it isn’t really programmable. But what it lacks in flexibility, it makes up for in reach and reliability.

Here’s an interesting question - If you had to lose one these clouds tomorrow, which would you miss most?

The conversion of the PSTN to IP (over the last decade) combined with the current wave of web-telephony integration (aka “Voice 2.0″) is fixing that flexibility gap.

More here… http://www.shaiberger.com/?p=47