What's a 'puter?

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/07/rackspace-launches-nomoreservers-com-to-tout-computing-as-a-service

This article/news item describes something that sounds a little desperate to me, though I like what I have heard about Rackspace, their values and how they do business. If I were trying to illustrate this, I'd have a a geeky kid standing by a rocket ship waiting to launch, trying to get someone to go with him, while a bunch of cool kids on motorcycles with cheerleaders on the back laughed at him. Is a rocketship a much better way to get to the moon? You bet. But not to get you to the dance on Saturday night, which is where the cool kids want to go. Will everybody be using rocketships in the future to commute home from moonwork? Again yes, but it's going to be a few years before they come with leather heated seats.

What's the parallel? I think that Rackspace is finding that the future may not be as close as they were lead to believe. Yes the web-two-oh crowd is fine with chucking the servers and moving into the cloud condo. But the enterprise folks are digging in their heels on giving up their datacenters just yet. Are they coming along eventually? Certainly. But they've just barely begun the move to VMs. They're in no hurry to take on the sea change that is cloud-computing. How did you miss the square footage of big iron (mainframes) still churning away? If they haven't gotten rid of that yet what makes you think they'd dump it's replacement, the midrange machine?

One characterization here I think is telling, and which explains my title, is their catchphrase "NoMoreServers". This is absolutely visionary. If the Internet is the computer, then there's certainly no more need for us to have racks full of boxes at work, right? I'll go them one leap better... "NoMoreComputers"! Cloud-computing is certainly just as much for Joe Everyman as it is for the Fortune 500. I'd love to keep the power of ubiquitious Internet while getting rid of the heat and noise, support problems, and loss of surface space in my home that personal computers represent. So Rackspace the enterprise isn't quite ready to climb in your rocketship. But how about little ol' me?