Mike Ellis tipped me to Simon Wardley who recently presented at the Future of Web Apps in London. Whilst that particular presentation isn’t up as a video, Wardley’s slightly older but very similar in content, presentation from OSCON 2007 is.
In a brilliant and witty presentation Wardley, much in the vein of Nick Carr, explores how IT services have moved from being a business advantage to a utility. He calls for an increasing focus on open source all they way “down the stack” (application layer, framework, hardware) as a way of freeing up resources and avoiding “reinventing the wheel” every time. The proposed “federated grid” in a “competitive utility market” as glimpsed in services like storage (Amazon’s S3), software-as-a-service (Salesforce) and even framework/platforms (Ning’s roll your own social networking service) arguably offers greater business advantage.
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