2008 is the year of Software Shift - Part 1 of ?

Back in the dot com boom, there were plenty of ideas that sounded great.  Unfortunately it seemed like there was a lack of technology and talent to get there.  Aeron chairs and big expensive Dell servers with cutting edge cubicles and catered lunches seemed to be the norm for a technology company.  How many of you remember the outlandish perks that were being given to anyone who knew about computers (I remember offers of BMWs and free dry cleaning).  Venture Capitalists were buying any and every company that had a .com attached to the end.  Sure they had business plans and lawyers, but in the end they didn’t have a product, only an idea or a concept.  While most of those companies that lacked a true service or product seemed to stretch their dollar and existence more so than their counterparts (having a real product or service requires significant overhead), they end the end still failed just like the rest.

Shift to 2008 and the scene is a whole lot different.  No longer do we have companies built from Marketing Strategists and Lawyers popping up everyday.  In the current age we have programmers and real designers leading the way.  In an age where you can deploy your app on an infrastructure designed to scale to the moon (Amazon AWS or Google AppEngine), a single guy with a laptop can build an application that has the same horsepower and infrastructure behind it as a company with Millions of dollars invested in hardware.

This shift has been enabled by allowing a lower price point entry and less of the upfront costs normally associated with hardware and hosting, let alone the technical complexities of it.  In these days and ages building your own data center is a ridiculous idea.  Even the big guys like Microsoft locate their servers in outside data centers.  Normally you’d have to purchase a hosting plan, and scale from there.  If you happen to get a sudden increase in traffic then you stumble into the reactionary model, scramble to get a bigger server and more bandwith and that gets you by until your next big surge.  Remember all of this requires upfront time and money.  You’ll also need a fair bit of technical expertise (or pay for it) along the way to get all of this working.  Yup more distraction from your core business and making it work.  The Amazon model (and more so the Google Appengine model) get rid of this work.  Your charged after the services have been delivered (after you’ve already gotten your customers and hopefully the cash).  In the case of Google’s Appengine you get resources that can handle up to approximately a million page views a month.  And it’s absolutely free.

These service offerings will create many new ideas and businesses as well as get the cogs turning in your heads.  I know mine are.