Patrick Collison once made a joke that if you erect enough enterprise software billboards, an airport will spontaneously appear around them (View Highlight)
Moving from mainframes to client-server didn’t just mean you went from renting one kind of box to buying another - it changed the whole way that computing worked. In particular, software became a separate business, and there were all sorts of new companies selling you new kinds of software, some of which solved existing problems but some of which changed how a company could operate (View Highlight)
The same shift is happening now, as companies move to the cloud - you go from owning boxes to renting them (perhaps), but more importantly you change what kinds of software you can use. If buying software means a URL, a login and a corporate credit card instead of getting onto the global IT department’s datacenter deployment schedule for sometime in the next three years, then you can have a lot more software from a lot more companies (View Highlight)
It’s also interesting just how long this can take. If you live in Silicon Valley, it would be natural to think that cloud and SaaS are old and done and boring, but this chart from Goldman Sachs, showing a survey of big company CIOs, suggests that less than a quarter of their workflows are in the cloud so far, and they’re moving slower than they expected. This stuff takes time, and you don’t necessarily have the budget or justification to rebuild everything overnight (View Highlight)
