At USV we have been thinking a lot about the nature of competition as the cloud computing era takes hold. The three closely related questions we are interested in are: How does cloud computing change competition at the “application” layer? How does cloud computing change the boundary between “infrastructure” and “applications”? How does cloud computing change competition in the “infrastructure” layer?Application and infrastructure are in quotation marks because they are convenient shorthands ...

At USV we have been thinking a lot about the nature of competition as the cloud computing era takes hold. The three closely related questions we are interested in are: How does cloud computing change competition at the “application” layer? How does cloud computing change the boundary between “infrastructure” and “applications”? How does cloud computing change competition in the “infrastructure” layer?Application and infrastructure are in quotation marks because they are convenient shorthands ...

Two days ago I wrote about how Google App Engine and cloud computing more generally will put pressure on traditional hosting. Another major area of the current IT landscape that will come under pressure is DB software. Sun recently (inadvertently) marked the top of the market for traditional DB software by paying $1B for MySQL (apparently this was 20x revenues). Storage will be a fundamental service in the cloud and will subsume both traditional file storage and most of the relational DB mark...

Two days ago I wrote about how Google App Engine and cloud computing more generally will put pressure on traditional hosting. Another major area of the current IT landscape that will come under pressure is DB software. Sun recently (inadvertently) marked the top of the market for traditional DB software by paying $1B for MySQL (apparently this was 20x revenues). Storage will be a fundamental service in the cloud and will subsume both traditional file storage and most of the relational DB mark...

This is the third post in my “clouds over” series, which points out areas of the current IT landscape that will be affected by the inexorable move to cloud computing (the first post was on hosting, the second on DB software). Today’s edition covers simple paid apps and services, such as hosted blogging platforms. Exhibit A is of course 37Signals’ Campfire, for which google engineers built a free version with very similar functionality which they had called HuddleChat. Google took it down beca...

This is the third post in my “clouds over” series, which points out areas of the current IT landscape that will be affected by the inexorable move to cloud computing (the first post was on hosting, the second on DB software). Today’s edition covers simple paid apps and services, such as hosted blogging platforms. Exhibit A is of course 37Signals’ Campfire, for which google engineers built a free version with very similar functionality which they had called HuddleChat. Google took it down beca...