Richard Davies wrote: The UK has a good crop of technology pioneers in cloud computing - for example ElasticHosts, FlexiScale, Flexiant, OnApp - and also some strong government initiatives such as G-Cloud.
We will have to see whether this kind of technical leadership converts into swift mass-market adoption or not.
One of the most exciting things about the software industry
is how fast it moves. Software is constantly optimizing itself around the
state-of-the-art. Inherent industry bottlenecks change cyclically every five
years or so. Architectures and solutions change too. CPUs too costly? Enter
dumb terminals. Network running slow? Build client/servers. It comes full
circle – the network becomes fast again and thin clients talk to big servers.
Networks become really fast, now you have grids. At the beginning of each of
these paradigm shifts, it’s not always immediately obvious what we’ll look back on as the brilliant technology decision that carried the day.
The indisputable force in recent years – open source – has
come to be renowned as the innovation to take on innovation itself. As a direct
result of the transformation of the software industry and maturation of open
source in the marketplace today, we’re seeing perhaps the greatest bottleneck
of them all finally fall: vendor lock-in.
Supporting the Old Guard
In predicatable evolution, software was owned and controlled
by a single company. Buying into a given technology often meant buying into a
single vendor. Companies were single-focused on building software that filled a
need and that need meant customers would buy. Support was an afterthought. And
software vendors knew that. They couldn’t really ignore customers or be so
negligent that customers defected to a competitor. But customers were truly
buying point solutions and support from all vendors was about the same, so the
process worked.
This vendor lock-in approach worked well for decades.
Optimized around the fact that it’s very hard to find good programmers, big
software companies would compete to hire the best programmers and use them to
build software and defend their business around that software.
With open source in the picture, this changed. As more
people began to code, there was more good code available. As a result, being
able to write acceptable software became commoditized. Tools and libraries
became more available – and there were more of them – making it easier to develop software. Development outsourcing today is a thriving industry, because
there are reasonable developers working across the globe often in countries
that have weaker currencies.
About Will Pugh Will Pugh is chief architect and co-founder at SourceLabs. He's worked in the software industry for over a decade in both start-ups and established companies like BEA and Microsoft.
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