I still prefer my business card as Hugh’s best cloud cartoon but this one is fun too. Over on his blog a debate is hotting up about the potential for one uber cloud computing company and just how big and lucrative that business would be. No question it would be HUGE but I disagree with the notion that there will be one player who wins or indeed a new entrant who will take the spoils in the cloud computing era. To dominate the cloud as Hugh suggests Microsoft has in software and Google has in search overlooks the fact that they are both software businesses with relatively low startup costs.

For the cloud or utility computing that is being suggested here you need a lot of geodistributed hardware. Of course that may change an a cloud vendor could arise who provides cloud compute using a P2P grid of existing machines but I don’t see that in the nearterm. In the nearterm (5 yrs) I see only a few companies who have the financial wherewithal and desire to play big in this game from a utility point of view. Ironically, both of them are software companies. You know who.