This can reduce response time tremendously. It gives them more bites at the apple.

The amount of computing resources put into place with a grid architecture can be enormous. Companies get to add the equivalent of a couple thousands PCs and that added horsepower that they do not have to pay for.

The one clear winner in all of this is IBM. IBM appears to be doing better and better because they are so damn stable.

A lot of the management of distribution is common sense. The problem is getting everyone's interests reasonably well aligned, getting people to play nicely together even though their interests are often not strictly aligned, and getting people to not act as though everything is a pure zero-sum game.

This is a more shrink-wrapped approach for the concept of grid computing that targets a more modest area of use.

I don't see this as a crushing delay, but it certainly is embarrassing. It sounds like a four- to five-month delay, and that's not a disastrous day for Intel.

That said, software as a service is an evolution, not a replacement for software as we know it.

A lot of these high-end business applications have a very high return on their investments. With grid architecture you can be ready to do that.