Microsoft just adding data center capacity in Ireland. Amazon is serving up cloud capacity in Europe. Google’s thirst for data centers is somewhat legendary. And now Red Hat is offering Red Hat Linux via Amazon’s EC2 platform.

While we might be talking about Facebook ads today, the real battleground, the one that makes everything up front tick is happening in the trenches. The desktop, long time champion of computing is dying, and being replaced (faster than you might realize) by a combination of mobile devices and “the cloud”. Oh, niche computing tasks will remain (anything that requires significant client side processing), but the cloud is where the battles will be won, whether it is via mobile, a think client, the browser, you name it.

It’s always been a reason why I think Google will win in the long term. Their core is built for the long haul and capable of handling multiple business models. Of course, I am biased towards any organization with an affinity for PhD’s.

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