Annual Computer Server Sales

At a recent presentation, Scott McNealy, the Chairman of the Board at Sun Microsystems, stated that estimates for 2007 were that worldwide sales of server computers were 8 million units. They believe that 1.5 million of these servers were purchased by Google. If you estimate the numbers purchased by Yahoo, MSN, Amazon.com, and Salesforce.com, it paints a picture in which server side computing is being dominated by a few big service providers. This seems to align with a statement that Sun’s CTO made in 2006 that “the world only needs 5 computers”. Most of these companies are creating a server-side infrastructure that can handle a huge load of the world’s computing needs as a subscription service, with few applications residing on the client-side (a.k.a. desktop or thin-client machines).

- Scott McNealy's Talk on the subject (somewhere on this page - they keep changing the URL)

- Greg Papadopolous' Five Computers:

Discussion with Greg Papadopoulos

During the Game Developers Conference, I had a great meeting with Greg Papadopoulos, the CTO of Sun Microsystems. We were able to explore a number of ideas for computing to support ubiquitous training applications for the military. Specifically,

• Servers - What kind of back-end servers/services do you need to provide a source from which to deliver training applications?
  
• Learning Metrics - How do you measure the impact that the training applications are having on the soldiers who are going through it?
  
• Identity Management - How do you verify the identity of the person who is being trained somewhere in the world?
  
• Long-haul Networking - What are the conduits that can deliver instantaneous training applications to soldiers?
  
• Training Client - What software technology can effectively carry training to 500,000 people spread all over the globe?