MIcrosoft in the Clouds.

Interview with Dan Reed:
http://www.hpcwire.com/features/Twins-Separated-at-Birth-41173917.html?viewAll=y

The scoop from Microsoft:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/ccf-022409.aspx

I confess, I have not digested nor read fully through all of this.
But when Microsoft exec's make statements like this:

"The specific aspect relative to HPC is that cloud services are game changers, just as commodity clusters were a decade ago and graphics accelerators have been recently. This is not the future, this is the present."

Now add in Azure and just about anything written to .NET can be turned into a software as a service.

Other than nagging doubts about security and robustness, which the big guys will just hammer away at with 'look how big we are, we can't be wrong' approaches, there really is the possibility that the PC as we know it has reached the end of it's popular life, much like an Atari Game console or an Eight Track tape. They still work, but who cares?