Why the acquisition by EMC by Dell may just be delaying the inevitable

It's not really all that new, but it's finally having a significant impact with the recent blockbuster $67b acquisition of EMC by Dell (WSJ) - a look at some of the winners and losers (Wired):

The Cloud. The term has taken on so many meanings in recent years. But keep in mind: most of these meanings come from IBM, HP, EMC, Dell, Cisco, and other companies that don’t want to be fucked by it. The best way to think about The Cloud is this: It’s the way that the giants of the Internet—aka Amazon, Google, and Facebook—build their businesses.

These companies built Internet businesses so large—businesses that ran atop hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of computers—they eventually realized they couldn’t build them with hardware and software from established vendors. They couldn’t use traditional storage gear from EMC. They couldn’t use servers from Dell and HP and IBM. They couldn’t use networking gear from Cisco. They couldn’t use databases from Oracle. It was too expensive. And it couldn’t scale. That’s another buzzword. It means “helping an online operation achieve world domination.”

What's exciting is that this distribution of computing power means that computing power will only continue getting cheaper and become more widely/easily available without the significant upfront costs that were previously required.