Red Shift Meets Event Horizon

Sun's CTO Greg Papadopoulos coined the term "red shift" to denote the massive IT buildout that is occurring in the likes of Google, Amazon, eBay, and the like as they provide ever-more-sophisticated services to ever-larger numbers of customers. He posits that this trend will continue, ultimately resulting in a "neutron star collapse of datacenters" to a small number of massive, centralized, highly efficient providers.It's a bizarre choice of term--doesn't a bigger red shift mean that the star we are seeing is further away and thus older (and probably already extinct)?--but it's certainly a compelling analysis.

I liked an article by Phil Wainewright (riffing on an article by Dan Farber about red shift theory) about the pros and cons of ultra-large data centers. As others have commented to me in the past, having all of your data and computing in a single location is not necessarily a good idea.