Hi. I’m back. Well, at least for a moment. I’m been radio silent for a while because I didn’t feel I had much to say. Blogger’s block, perhaps. I prefer to think of it as editing in extremis.
Over the past few months we have seen the rise of “cloud computing” or “platform as a service” as evolution in the world of IT. From one perspective it is an incremental evolution. We have moved from proprietary data centers to hosting environments to platform environments. The technology isn’t what is revolutionary; it is the economic model.
Go back to 1998. We bought big iron, big o/s, big RDBMS, and big pipes all in service of building web applications. Open source drastically cut the entry price for a good idea. We saw an explosion of creativity unleashed in Web 2.0 beginning circa 2003-4. The cost of entry went from millions to thousands of dollars.
Now the cost of provisioning the systems in entirely has gone to zero. Google Apps is a free developer sandbox for web apps, at least for web apps that meet their design constraints. I think it is reasonable to assume that the Python-only, non-transactional computing model that Google offers today will drive others to offer other computing stacks that support other flavors of development models, all equally free. There is a phase transition between cheap and free. I assume the growth of free application provisioning environments will cause another renaissance on the scale of Web 2.0. (I will resist the temptation to label it. You're welcome.)
Let’s fast-forward another ten years. If the market price of provisioning an application goes to zero more broadly, who is impacted? What does this mean for
- SaaS application providers?
- Enterprise IT?
- and vendors like BMC, IBM, and HP that dominate data center automation today?
Perhaps the value will shift from applications to infrastructure. Security, disaster recovery, archiving, etc., will still be needed - as services, not products. Freemium comes to enterprise computing.
We all know that the history of computing has been about platform shifts. Free is the next disruption. Like all platform shifts, it begins as a small but structural change in the economics of adoption. It ends with the re-alignment of the market, with a couple of survivors, and many more new entrants.
