Grid Computing: The Next Push
http://www.shirky.com/writings/grids.html

Grid Computing is, according to the Grid Information Centre, a way to
"...enable the sharing, selection, and aggregation of a wide variety
of geographically distributed computational resources."  It is, in
other words, an attempt to make Sun's famous pronouncement "The
Network Is The Computer" an even more workable proposition. (It is
also an instantiation of several of the patterns of decentralization
that used to travel together under the name peer-to-peer.)
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Despite the potential generality of the Grid, most of the public
pronouncements are focusing on the use of Grids for supercomputing.
IBM defines it more narrowly: Grid Computing is "... applying
resources from many computers in a network-at the same time-to a
single problem", and the MIT Technology Review equated Grid technology
with supercomputing on tap when it named Grids one of "Ten
Technologies That Will Change the World."
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This view is wrong.  Supercomputing on tap won't live up to to this
change-the-world billing, because computation isn't a terribly
important part of what people do with computers.  This is a lesson we
learned with PCs, and it looks like we will be relearning it with
Grids.