hmm let me guess (and there's a hint in the article) ... us patents ? A quick research gives about 3757 patents concerning laser printing : http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec... . Apart from the fact that there are still efforts to be made to have the same kind of "open source" activity in the hardware world imho.
In 1991 I had a lovely little Apple Laserwriter IIg networked laser printer. In the intervening 20 years all of the patents covering that device will have expired.
Surely some of the subsequent patents have been related to making the printer cheaper, so that could lead to a price disadvantage, but it should be possible to make a fine patented free laser printer.
(of the many printers I've had subsequently, none have performed as well in the "paper jam" and "mysteriously hung network printer" category. The IIg was unable to reliably feed 6x8 envelopes, but other than that was perfect.)
Imagine, if you will, that you have a computing furnace. When you turn it on, it makes itself available to the cloud. You receive credit for the cycles used, enough to pay for the electricity it consumes. On hot days, you turn it off.
This seems very much like having your own windmill connected to the grid. In the case of computing furnaces, there would be more capacity in the winter and at night. But at some point when bandwidth and hardware become cheap enough, these would be feasible even if they don't run 24/7/365.
The problem is, what if somebody stores their data in your server, and then you decide to turn it off? Will the data have to be automatically mirrored on several other servers (inefficient) or will it have to be mirrored when you want to shut off your computing furnace (slow)?
In my future, all data is distributed P2P like torrents, as is all computation. The only correct architecture for a server is that to turn it off, you simply turn it off :-)
But I was thinking more about computation than data, even though the article author is thinking of data. So EC2, not S3.
Perhaps the enclosure could be separated from the room (much like an underground water boiler) and a valve could be used to switch between seasons.
My main problem with the study is that they probably didn't factor in overhead costs. Once the finances make sense — if they ever do — you can probably bet on some kind of success. Corporations are one track minded and will follow the bottom line. The tricky part will be changing consumer behavior.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-20/french-air-power-be...