Sharing resources (or cores) seems to be the main reason vmware and other virtualization schemes fall short. You dedicate some number of cores to the environment, and chop up your fancy machine. While I'm not sure that you need a mainframe to achieve this, Ibm and others seem to be heading in that direction with smaller less expensive scalable alternatives. Severs themselves have as many cores as older mainframes. I recently read an article on zdnet about the proposed system of atom processors, to save energy, but what it really does is quantify the power that is available to the virtual environment. It really doesn't take much to spool data from a hard drive.
The downside is server side processing,( which is where the current model becomes a lot more centralized). I think that murph does have a point, when you start creating applications, and online intellegence, and atom processor or something that has the power of one is going to run out of gas pretty fast. Why we need containers for instances of apache, and why we need to carve up larger computers for "security's sake" is a shortcoming in all the available software, and really points to the larger fragmentation problem across the internet structure.
The "standards" being developed (such as html 5) have so many vested interests, that they aren't standards at all, but some sort of advertising, and a method to lock up content by software suppliers. Paid for codecs, proprietary and patented processes, all make sure that you will be buying someone's software or paying a toll for whatever you write. The vmware model is another tax collector, robbing the power of the internet, rather than creating a collective supercomputer.
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