Clouds and Virtualization to Spawn a "Googleplex" of Innovation

All the world is abuzz with talk of enterprise clouds and the virtualization of IT. I have a personal, anecdotal story of my own that supports these trends. I share offices in Mountain View with a company that is developing a complex and feature rich enterprise software application. They have a 20 person U.S. based development team and they have spent next to nothing on IT infrastructure. They do development with Google Apps, use the Google cloud for hosting, and beyond that have outfitted each developer with a PC and high speed access. They are building an app that would have required at least six figures worth of hardware and software purchases alone to develop just three or four years ago.

This developer/IT model is radically efficient and will lower barriers against innovation on a grand scale. This model will allow "2 guys in a garage" to develop businesses again. And this time, they won't hit their credit card limits until they actually have a working prototypes.

The tech ecosystem will be forever changed, with a move away from very early VC funding, far less need for extensive (and really chilly!) office space dedicated to server racks, and the opportunity for nimble software developers to more readily compete with the large, incumbent software vendors.

Yes, the successful high tech companies of tomorrow are much flatter today, and the Silicon Valley organizational model will have to adapt itself to change once again. But with the innovation machine just starting to flex its muscles, would you want it any other way?