Gary Allison's Leadership Blog

As you can tell by the frequency of my posts, things have been very busy at work – no complaints though, I know of friends and associates that would like to have such a problem. I wanted to follow up on one of the thoughts in the prior post regarding the global ramifications of effect of freely / very affordable cloud computing services.

With services like google app engine and amazon’s elastic compute cloud offering free and low cost resources that would have previously required investment of at least six zeros, the bar is substantially lowered to take a good idea to market.  To build out an idea, you now really just need a handful of expertise and time – not to mention a lot less time that you once did.

This opens competition up on a global scale never seen before – certainly there are many excellent and bright developers in India, China, Eastern Europe, Russia, Brazil, you get the picture.  The value increases for innovative ideas, domain knowledge, and the ability to market the solution.

I firmly believe America remains the cradle of innovation; it is in the very core of our society and our DNA.  I’ve had the privilege over my career to work with some of the best and brightest, and feel very blessed that I still do every day.  It is heartening to see the innovation coming out of Apple and my own company.  Still it is going to be a very different world when my daughters enter the workforce.   Change is coming and it is coming even faster than we can imagine.