I’m at Tier 1’s Hosting Transformation Summit for two days of meetings, presentationa and discussions with the leaders in the hosting industry. This is the second year I’ve attended and the Tier 1 folks do a great job of bringing together the senior execs from the major players.

Our CEO, Barry Lynn, did a great job on a pannel regarding utility computing. During the talk he made a rather controversial statement - that computing could eventually be made free.

The basis for his statement are calculations based on our user’s costs for operating online services versus traditional colocation. Projecting those calculations into the future there is indeed a crossover point - a time in the future when the cost of computing could be supported by some other monetization method such as advertising.

Sound ridiculus? So did getting applications for free at one point.