Frank Hayes of ComputerWorld is debunking Nicholas Carr's latest attempt to define the end of corporate IT. In the process, he makes an interesting side point:

Users are the ones who experiment and create business innovation. So the most important place to put computing, and control of that computing, is in users' hands. Everything else -- networks, data, back-end applications -- is there to support those users. They do corporate computing. We in IT just help.

And if we replace their flexible, too-cheap-to-meter computing with thin clients and a fixed-cost, fixed-services utility, as Carr recommends? IT gains manageability, centralization and higher utilization. Business users lose the ability to innovate

This might be why Sun has had such trouble with the whole network computer thing. CPUs, disk space, and memory have been getting cheaper, so it makes less and less sense to centralize. The only cross current is the difficulty inherent in backing up so much data.