1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting a server setup, installing Xen, and then rolling out your own VMs that way. From Windows or Mac, these VMs could then be accessed over SSH.
2. It doesn't actually replace a dedicated server. This does not solve the connectivity issue.
3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
(/s)
Here's a skeptical comment[1] from Slashdot that was scored by that community as "5:Insightful":
>"Sun's grid effort has pretty much laid an egg. Perhaps I have the economics wrong, but isn't it more cost effective to build your own cluster out of discarded PCs?"
As counterpoint, here's a positive comment[2] to that same announcement that was more enthusiastic about the possibilities:
>Jeremy Wright • 10 years ago: Holy @#$@... We were about to move to Rackspace mainly for uptime support.
If you take Jeremy Wright's research into the new economics of cloud computing and multiply it by a hundred thousand like-minded people, you can trace a direct line from that kind of post to the Rackspace sale to private equity that made the HN front page yesterday[3]. The seeds of Rackspace's sale 10 years later were sowed from the very moment of Amazon's EC2 beta announcement.