Distributed Computing Economics

With all this talk about Web services, Grid computing and Software as a Service I thought you might be interested in taking a read of this article on the Economics of Distributed Computing by Jim Gray.

The paper includes a good overview of the cost of computing and web services plus an interesting discussion about application economics where he describes the forces related to deciding how to structure a distributed application - based on the relative cost of resources such as WAN network costs, LAN network costs, CPU cost, disk space etc.