While reading ~~'Above the Clouds'~~ from UC Berkley, see http://berkeleyclouds.blogspot.com/, I discovered two nuggets that may shed some light on Bob Giffords comments about electricity being a gravitational force. The first is that 
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Physics tells us it's easier to ship photons than electrons; that is, it's cheaper to ship data over fiber optic cables than to ship electricity over high voltage transmission lines.
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They also examine __Jim Gray__'s work, quoting {link:"Distributed Computing 
Economics"|http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1394131}, which observes that as one combines network, storage and CPU resource, there is a break even point at which remote/cloud processing becomes uneconomic because the network (& storage) costs involved in moving the work to the cloud are too high, and or the relative cost advantage of the cloud's economomies of scale are insufficient to compensate for the network costs. Gray concludes that one should,
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Put the computation near the data
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The Berkley paper further observes that wide area networking costs have fallen at the slowest rate compared with other IT resources. This doesn't consider the fact that the price of electricity, has of course risen, which is odd, since it's easier to ship photons...., however making electricity consumes real resources, all the time.