Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing, + Website

Democratization of IT

Cloud further democratizes IT. Computing used to be restricted to a few disciples granted admission to the inner sanctum of the glass house data center. Along came the PC, and anyone in the company could use standard applications, such as word processing, graphics, and spreadsheet tools. Now the cloud has unleashed creativity, innovation, and experimentation. YouTube enables you to “Broadcast Yourself,”9 and Flickr lets you “Share your life in photos.”10 Moreover, cloud-based platform as a service (PaaS) enables virtually anyone to break through the limitations of a handful of packaged software programs and write their own: This is not just the democratization of the use of IT enabled by the PC and desktop software but the democratization of the creation of IT, something akin to the way the television democratized the use of moving pictures but the video camera democratized their creation.

Chris Anderson, serial author and editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, popularized the phrase “the long tail,” referring to shifts in consumption—particularly relevant to information goods—associated with stockless and thus costless inventorying and frictionless distribution via web-based ordering and recommendation engines.11 John Dillon, the CEO of Engine Yard, a cloud PaaS company, called this democratization the long tail of IT, noting the wide variation in use cases—and users—of Engine Yard’s platform. Moreover, as with Zara’s “fast fashion,” in which new styles are rapidly ...