VMware is launching VMotion, technology allowing admins to "move applications from one computer to another without any interruption in service." according to Robert McMillan.
At first I was really amped about this because I parsed "application" as "virtual machine". Moving applications is pretty boring, (cf. the old UC Berkeley Sprite operating system) although depending on restrictions this at least moves the granularity of mobility up from thread like computations.
Now when we can start sloshing around running VMs on an optical network then the world will change. Think about it. We've got a decent handle on how to manage individual desktop machines. Let's just make that the unit of distributed computation and be done with it.