Commoditisation of IT. And ducks.

I said on a previous post that I’d write more about Simon Wardley’s excellent presentation at the Future of Web Apps conference. He’s now put the presentation on Slideshare but warns (and he’s right) that it’s not an easy one to digest without the audio. Apparently FOWA are going to be publishing the sound for free sometime but there’s no sign of it right now.

Simon’s presentation focused on a number of things which also feature large in my personal tag cloud. Not ducks (although I like them, too) but:

Ducks. Simon likes them.1. Commoditisation of IT – how the movement from new thing to utility service creates tensions as products move from competitive advantage to the cost of doing business

2. Innovation – how the shift from Today’s Hot Stuff to Tomorrow’s Boredom (or, as Tom Standage puts it, the move towards invisible technology) drives, and is driven by, commoditisation

3. How the “new world” of the API and computing in the cloud becomes a utility service: how in this day and age we should be looking at the cloud for IT services and not building and re-building each time we put an application on the web. It’s a view which I’m pushing as hard as I can whenever I can, and it’s lovely to see such an erudite set of slides on a subject area which isn’t the easiest to explain.

It also turns out that Simon has written about the Internet Of Things, Spimes and a bunch of other stuff which really tickle my interest, but these might have to wait until a later post…

One of the major contrasts with Simons presentation, as I said previously was that he really can present in an amusing and interesting way, which was in sharp contrast to pretty much everyone else at the FOWA conference. His presentation style reminded me very much of Dick Hardt’s now famous Identity 2.0 talk which you should check out if you haven’t already.

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