IBM Wants CPU Time To Be A Metered Utility

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Thursday October 31, 2002 @07:53AM from the from-my-cold-dead-fingers dept.

kwertii writes "IBM CEO Samuel J. Palmisano announced a sweeping new business strategy yesterday, pledging $10,000,000,000 towards redefining computing as a metered utility. Corporate customers would have on-demand access to supercomputer-level resources, and would pay only for time actually used. The $10 billion is slated for acquisitions and research to put the supporting infrastructure in place. Will this model revolutionize the way companies compute, or is this plan doomed to be another PCjr?"

1 of 511 comments (clear)

Dangerous, but it could mean profits by SexyKellyOsbourne · 2002-10-31 07:58 · Score: 2, Troll

As long as IBM doesn't change the rates for processing in conjunction with Moore's law, making the processing cheaper on their end, there could be quite a boost in profits from their current business model simply selling the hardware.

But then again, one of the reasons that Enron went down is that they quit selling real, hard, physical commodities and instead went directly to a more ethereal model of paper sales and transactions.