A friend of mine, with whom I once shared an office at a Seattle dot-com, is still
in Seattle and working for a recently constituted startup. This company is based
on a reasonable idea, which is interesting in and of itself, but the thing that really
got my attention was the prolific use of distributed services and heterogamous
technology components used to run the company.
They develop in Ruby on Rails. Developers carry an assortment of operating systems
on their laptops (Mac or PC as a personal preference, I understand). Server space
for product hosting and source control is rented (SVN via HTTP); They do
not own the machines. Email and scheduling services are outsourced, there is
no $10K investment in MS Exchange plus an IT shop to run it. During the first
few months of the company’s existence, the existing staff met in coffee shops and
other places without actually needing an office.
This is the realization of the new Internet and the new information worker.
I knew in the back of mind that Software as a Service was out there and a reality,
I just hadn’t seen it. Now I have, and it is very exciting. The best part
is that the people using these tools seem rather non-plussed by them. This distributed
model of intellectual asset management is merely ubiquitous.
This is all very 37 Signals in
tone and you have not yet read the
book, you are missing the wave.
We live in exciting times.