I'm promoting a new business model: Whole
Business Outsourcing (WBO).
It's the next logical step after Full Functional Outsourcing (FFO) and
its successor, business process outsourcing (BPO).
Here's our value
proposition:
A popular means to personal wealth is to start a company, create the
illusion of success, then get rid of it for a large chunk of change,
leaving the hard work of running it at a profit to someone else.
If you accept the
popular-but-unsupported-by-a-shred-of-evidence
proposition that businesses should "keep the core and outsource the
rest," it follows that for companies like this, everything except
shareholder relations, the IPO process, venture funding, and selling the
company outright (pick no more than two) must be non-core.
Which makes companies
like this logical candidates for WBO.
Give me a call.
Some
history: While the dot-com bubble (which by today's standards
constituted solid economic growth) didn't invent the
share-of-stock-as-the-company's-real-product business model -- WBO's
target market -- it perfected it, and the model lives on in the dreams
of modern entrepreneurs everywhere.
A decade before that,
and the dawning awareness of the Internet that
spawned it, we saw the invention of the personal computer. If it weren't
for this one device, the United States' economy would be far smaller
and we'd all be a lot poorer.
This history isn't
merely academic. It has a lot to say to proponents
of Cloud Computing, its skeptics, and you.
First of all: With
the PC came a burst of innovation whose best
historical parallel might have been the first commercial availability of
electrical power. Our modern software industry had its roots there:
Even Oracle, the epitome of anti-personal-computing software
architecture proponents, would at best be a marginal player had we
continued on the old path of IBM defining the architecture and providing
everything in it.
Also of interest: In
the 1980s, when all this was taking place,
technology entrepreneurs saw their road to affluence (while most dreamed
of actual wealth, few expected it) to be running companies that sold
and supported products.
What charming naiveté
they had.
Here's what the
history of the PC has to say about The Cloud: If it
succeeds, its success won't come from companies migrating their
computing infrastructures to it, for two reasons.
The first: It's
unlikely. The second: It's undesirable.
It's unlikely because migrating your
company's computing to
The Cloud would be hugely expensive with little obvious payoff.
Really, what would be the point?
Here's why it's
undesirable: When looking at innovation for the PC
platform, what stands out was that it was empowering, subversive, and
actually innovative.
It was empowering: It
created new capabilities that helped individual
employees be more effective, and helped those who wanted to run their
own lemonade stands compete with corporate giants on an equal footing.
It was subversive: By
placing unregulated computing capabilities in
the hands of ordinary end-users it let individuals and departments
figure out their own solutions without having to ask centralized IT ...
or, for that matter, centralized layout and design, financial analysis,
or anything else ... for support.
It was innovative:
Much of what the new software companies sold had
never existed before: Electronic spreadsheets, personal databases and
personal information management, presentation support ... these were new
ideas, not just old ideas ported to a new platform.
What the PC wasn't,
back then, was powerful enough to include in
mainstream enterprise applications.
Compare this burst of
creativity and simultaneous lack of enterprise
readiness to The Cloud. It also isn't ready for the enterprise. As for
creativity, it isn't there. Just the same old stuff, only hosted on the
Internet. The same old stuff means The Cloud isn't creating any new
wealth, only redistributing it.
It's time to stop
promoting the idea that The Cloud will be
disruptive by doing the same old stuff, only over the Internet on
someone else's hardware, platforms, and software.
The Cloud won't be
important until something in it surprises us.
Thus far, the recent
Internet surprises haven't been there. They've
been YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, which aren't even partly Cloudy.
And if you're really
looking for something nobody has ever thought
about doing before with software ... well, there's an app for that.
What makes Steve Jobs
interesting isn't that he designs cool gadgets
with awesome user interfaces. It's that alone among the original PC
pioneers, he remembers what allowed the PC revolution to create so much
wealth. It was how it encouraged empowerment, subversion, and
innovation.
You should too, because when you come right down to it, these are the
core American virtues.
