From TechRepublic:
Industry lore likely is wrong to attribute to IBM Chairman Thomas J. Watson the famous misjudgment that there’s a world market for five computers.
But Sun Microsystems Chief Technology Officer Greg Papadopoulos thinks the idea will pan out eventually.
“The world needs only five computers,” Papadopoulos said on his blog. He then listed seven–Google, eBay, Amazon.com, Microsoft, Yahoo, Salesforce.com, and what he called the Great Computer of China–but let’s not split hairs. He was trying to make the point that “there will be, more or less, five hyperscale, pan-global broadband computing services giants.”