I hear what you're saying, but that doesn't address the REASON why people FAIL TO KNOW about WCG. You are listing what people do with computers...I'm talking about people who don't even know WCG exists...these are completely different topics.

Advertising does not necessarily cost money...as I mentioned, the WCG could contact numerous publications to offer an article. I read lots of magazines, and a few are technical...there are OFTEN articles about distributed/grid computing...yet SETI@Home is always the example (I used to be a SAH member but now devote my cpus towards Cancer). Where are the WCG examples? Where are the Cancer examples?

Advertising COULD cost money if they wanted to advertise on Google or in the paper or in Time Magazine...sure...but I'm talking about free "advertising" such as great websites, a 15-minute segment on Discovery Channel or a 4-page article in National Geographic/Discover/Scientific American. There is also word of mouth advertising like Facebook pages.

Why aren't there pushes from ANY of the thousands of colleges and universities in world to say "welcome Freshman...as part of your orientation we would love to talk to you for a few minutes about how you can help cure cancer..."

These ideas are not hard to think about...but WCG has been around for at least 4 years and 500k users is a joke. IBM itself has 300,000+ employees and I know for a fact that IBM does not even advertise internally via yearly emails to consider joining...even if IBM said to not user IBM machines and use only personal computers. That's a bit of a punch in the face. There's been more talk in 2 days about Watson going on Jeopardy (months before it even went on the show!) then 4 years of WCG. When Watson won, the proceeds went to WCG...you would have thought millions of people would have clicked on the link to read where IBM donated the money and out of those million, 10% would have signed up to WCG...but no. So there is definitely an "advertising" problem. IBM might as well have donated the money to feeding squirrels. I'm not sure where the $77,000 donated money actually "went" within WCG, but they couldn't have taken $10,000 and put it towards some kind of paid advertising? IBM (or other donors) couldn't have pitched in money to buy some kind of big advertising spot...say on MSN or Boston.com or NYTimes.com or some other websites or print media?

This is not an IBM rant...but I'm looking for people's opinions on why there are so few users in WCG. It seems as if there's not a single person on the WCG committee (my wording) that even ATTEMPTS to spread the word about the common good that can/will come out of WCG.

https://secure.worldcommunitygrid.org/viewTellAFriend.do this is something that wcg provided btw so you can tell people about worldcommunitygrid. They have three tailor made emails.

Actually, that's not quite true - as, certainly when I was on the 'inside' of Big Blue, fairly regular articles were added to newsletters - thing is, did people read/act on them (probably not). One thing IBM did (and probably still does), is via their internal software installation system, BOINC was installed ready to be activated by the individual user (under the member 'IBM' - and hence, the reason why that particular member has 30,584 devices installed against it).

Along with a lot more being done internally from IBM, externally, if we could get more computer manufacturers having BOINC pre-installed on their computers (with a 'pop-up' window explaining what it is/how to get started etc.), would help, as well as getting educational/research institutes involved (and that includes research charities etc. - how many cancer related charities are there out there, with computers not contributing to any of the cancer grid projects?).

So yes, I agree entirely, if we had even just a tiny fraction more users, we'd be able to knock a lot more science projects on the head.

I could not said it better myself...