Aug

5

Not withholding innovation by decoupling from low(er)-level constraints

Filed Under cloud computing, innovation, paas, regular reads, saas, technology, web 2.0 

Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce kicked off this month in cloud computing and SaaS news with a guest post on TechCrunch.

Some key highlights:

Web 1.0 was about the emergence of the “killer app” from companies like eBay, Amazon.com, and Google. Although we thought of them as Web sites at the time, they were really amazing applications with a level of functionality, ease of use, and scale that had rarely been seen before by the average consumer. Transactions, not just of goods but of knowledge, became ubiquitous and instant. The efficiency and transparency that was once the domain of global financial markets was now at the command of individual consumers and businesses.

It’s about empowering the everyday worker (especially the small business guys) with powerful tools previously only available to mega-corps with deep pockets. Web 2.0, cloud computing, SaaS leaves a taste of benevolence on my tongue, and I like it.

That’s “benevolence”, the way Paul Graham says it:

Surely Microsoft isn’t benevolent? But when I think back to the beginning, they were. Compared to IBM they were like Robin Hood. When IBM introduced the PC, they thought they were going to make money selling hardware at high prices. But by gaining control of the PC standard, Microsoft opened up the market to any manufacturer. Hardware prices plummeted, and lots of people got to have computers who couldn’t otherwise have afforded them. […] Microsoft isn’t so benevolent now.

I guess I like rooting for the underdog and taking on the incumbents ;) Any big problem is a big opportunity, right?

More from Marc’s post:

Web 3.0 changes all of this by completely disrupting the technology and economics of the traditional software industry. The new rallying cry of Web 3.0 is that anyone can innovate, anywhere. Code is written, collaborated on, debugged, tested, deployed, and run in the cloud. When innovation is untethered from the time and capital constraints of infrastructure, it can truly flourish.

Emphasis is mine on that last sentence, since I think it’s worth noting. It’s why I absolutely <3 SaaS/cloud computing and believe in it. Too many times, as a software engineer .. you cut back on truly innovative ideas because of the voice of fear that speaks softly to you from the back of your mind, “but dude, you’re opening a can of worms; you need to do this, that, and it’s mostly all prickly infrastructure stuff that you’re not an expert in and would take you days/weeks/months to get up to speed! gahh .. can’t we find another less innovative solution that is easier to implement?”

And sad to say, most would take the easy way out — innovate lesser, in smaller incremental chunks (to keep the pain points low). And that’s infrastructure holding back otherwise creative problem solving.

According to Daryl Plummer, managing VP of Gartner (IT), about $8 of every $10 spent on technology in corporations is for maintaining systems, as opposed to innovating. Talk about a serious baggage.
“It’s hard to turn a big ship very quickly […] You have technologies that are like cement in these businesses—they’re hard to change and get rid of.”

I believe that with cloud computing and SaaS, we’ll see more bottom-up (of the org chart) punching of holes in the “corporate policy” firewall, because business units needs stuff done, and IT departments can’t keep up. This is especially true in huge bureaucratic companies.

Imagine you’re leading a small team inside of a large mega-corp of low importance. You need X, and IT says, “ok, we’ve got your request, we’ll get back to you in 7 business days with a yay/nay because we need to research (how to implement) this.” And since you’re of relatively low importance .. you probably won’t get it, or will get it but after they have forgotten it for the 3rd time because it was pushed onto the back burner that many times.

But hey, you still have deliverables that *need* to get done! The trains still need to run on time, even for the lowly team buried in a huge company.

Hmm .. spending $50 a month on a SaaS subscription to X might actually save you so much time and hassle that .. well, you just might try it out to see how it feels. And that’s one of the beauties of the pay-per-drink model. You don’t need to commit to a large budget upfront.

p.s. I don’t really know about using Web 3.0 moniker; a tad bit unoriginal, and worn out. Plus, it’s mostly used by semantic web proponents–which is different from SaaS/cloud computing.

References:

Update - Wow, I just caught a glimpse into the future of browser user interfaces, and this is REALLY awesome. Check out the video in full screen. What does that have to do with this post? Well .. all that fancy UI that really helps collaboration and productivity requires a lot of infrastructure in the background. Folks that focus on the front end should be free to innovate and push the boundaries on that — and let the scaling experts do what they do best. Another case for cloud computing and SaaS!


Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.
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