The World Needs Only 5 Computers

Greg Papadopolous, the CTO of Sun Microsystems, has been getting a lot of play from the statement that the world only needs 5 computers. This plays against a (purported) famous statement by Thomas Watson Jr. of IBM, when he truly believed that there were only a few customers for big computers. Greg P. has an entirely different meaning. He sees the networking of the world as a force that will concentrate computational power into a few major centers that will serve up most of the services that people will need from computers. As examples he identifies the 5 providers of these services as Google, eBay, Amazon.com, Microsoft, and Salesforce.com.

Militarizing this idea, we could say that the Army only needs 3 computers. These would be networked “hyperscale machines” (Papadopolous’ term) that serve up: (1) Business IT, (2) Mission Operations, and (3) Training Events. As with Papadopolous’ list of 5, further digging will reveal that these 3 computers only cover 80-90% of what the Army needs to do. Perhaps there will be smaller machines for R&D and other functions. Yes, smaller. The amount of R&D computation is probably very small compared to the pooled operations in the top three categories of business, mission, and training.

Papadopolous’ original article