Are grid computing contests the right driver for enterprise?

Although I don't consider myself to be an economist by any means, I have always admired John Kenneth Galbraith who passed away late last month at the age of 97. I have used his quotes in this blog before, drawing parallels between the science and of economics and the science of the of Grid.

In my last blog entry I commented on Sun Microsystem's contest to find practical applications for their Sun Grid infrastructure. Currently a "road without cars", the point of my comments were that if Sun wants to see Grid succeed, they need to be a bit more proactive and start creating applications themselves as opposed to sponsoring contests and hoping the killer application falls out of the sky.

Recently the Department of Trade and Industry and the British Computer Society in the UK launched a similar contest to find practical applications as to how Grid computing can be used to enhance existing processes and solve existing problems.

Both of these efforts seem a bit academic to me and have me questioning the business sense of these efforts in attracting true enterprise Grid end users. While this approach may be less risky I just don't see Grid succeeding in enterprise unless big players like Sun actually start producing useable Grid enterprise applications themselves.

The contest approach reminds me of another Galbraith quote: "Economists are economical, among other things, of ideas; most make those of their graduate days last a lifetime."

Economists and the science of economics certainly made the transition from graduate school to the enterprise. I have great faith that Grid can do the same but it has to involve some risk taking and a lot of real work.