Yesterday, Nat Torkington had an interesting post on O’Reilly Radar (not to be confused with Radar O’Reilly) entitled “The effect of the Depression on Technology.”
Whether I would classify what we’re in as a “Depression” or not, is beside the point. The economy is definitely not doing well and folks are spooked. Seeing the glass as half-full, Nat see’s this current period as good for innovation, good for free and open source software and good for services and cloud computing:
…open source services and cloud computing will benefit from the tight financial situation where conditions will favour opex and not capex. It wil be nigh impossible to borrow to buy hardware or a major software license….cloud computing lets a company pay a little to use someone else’s enormous capital investment.
Opex vs. Capex
This opex vs. capex distinction is one of the great advantages of services provided by the cloud (in both good times and bad). It helps to break down barriers to adoption, and allows purchases to be made in a timely manner rather than getting bogged down in endless approval cycles.
Separate from approval-cycle-avoidance, the other adoption mega-accelerator for cloud-based services is the basic hosted nature of the services. Offsite hosting and maintenance mean that new services can be switched virtually instantaneously without needing to burden the often already over-taxed IT side of the house.
So, while I agree with Nat’s thinking, I hope we don’t have to test it for too long.
Pau for now…
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