Commoditisation of IT and what the future holds
Simon Wardley from zimki has just been up on stage here at the Future of Web Apps. A good presenter, with plenty of amusing pics to support some very valid points that certainly resonate with us at Talis.
Simon talked about commoditisation in the IT sector, and starts by offering a few definitions…
“change from monopolistic to perfect competition”
“yesterday’s hot stuff becomes today’s boredom”
“rare thing becomes ubiquitous and distributed”
“competitive advantage becomes cost of doing business”
and
“new thing moves to leading edge which moves to standard product which becomes a utility service”
He uses the standard example of the electricity industry, which we’ve used quite a lot at Talis in the past, and then moves on to introduce zimki, which is one attempt to commoditise the delivery of Javascript web apps in ways somewhat similar to Amazon with compute power on EC2 or Talis with data in our Platform.
Simon wraps up with
“Later this year we’ll open source everything”
effectively addressing the usual concerns around lock-in, and reliance upon third parties.
This looks to be one that’s worth a closer look.
Technorati Tags: FOWALondon07, FOWALondon2007, zimki, Talis
February 20th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
Simon is certainly right to observe that the cycle of “adopt, use and then discard” is speeding up, which is allowing firms to briefly leapfrog each others. Yet it is also creating enormous pressure on companies of all sizes since the short honeymoon period during which you get packback for innovation is almost too short to recoup investment.