Abstract Over the next decade, I expect more and more computing on phones and small computers and less on clouds and supercomputers. Supercomputers are super impressive to engineers, but not to economists because economies of scale have more to do with the size of the market than the size of the machine. Clouds are like wire-wrapped Cray computers; they were never designed for mass production. There was never much supply or demand. Supercomputers and clouds are too expensive and burn too much power. The future is more promising for phones because the market is larger. In addition, there are a number of other advantages to computing on phones and small (commodity) machines designed for mass markets: privacy, power, size, weight, latency, bandwidth, and especially affordability.
Kenneth Church (Tue,) studied this question.