Comments on: There’s still money in old-school tech, and maybe a lesson for startups too

By: David Mytton

David Mytton — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 21:54:44 +0000

Spend on “everything else” is decreasing which is in line with what you’d expect and shows where the real growth in cloud services will be – new projects. Old projects “just work” so there is no business reason to change that. But new projects have a lot of choices, which is where cloud providers are going to step in.

By: Jeff Schneider

Jeff Schneider — Tue, 25 Dec 2012 11:04:28 +0000

Yes, enterprise spends money on ‘old technology’ from the the vendors they bought it from when it was ‘new technology’. Suggesting a startup should try to capture incumbent revenue in a diminishing-growth area is “odd”.

By: Eddie

Eddie — Tue, 25 Dec 2012 06:43:35 +0000

Alex, this was an excellent article, thanks for reminding the world about inertia and just how difficult it is to overcome in some contexts (especially GigaOm readers which get inundated day-in day-out with “cloud-this” and “NoSQL-that” type of stuff! In 1998 I was a subcontractor to a small consulting firm that was hired to do what was, at that time, cutting edge work by using Java with CORBA to do dig into a big pharma’s VAX mainframe to pull out sales data and present it to their mobile sales people in the field via the worldwide web. That was a huge deal at that time (the reason the company took the risk on Java I’m quite sure is because Sun was massively behind it and a lot of big companies trusted Sun due to their reputation with SPARC machines etc.). Big companies with a lot of risk at stake are much much less likely to trust ad-hoc code in Github that may look popular today but could end up dying in the vine (if the code owners / maintainers eventually abandon it). So Marc Andreessen can cackle all he wants about how “software is eating the world” and why his VC firm has invested in GitHub for example, but its not as if its eating the entire world all in one bite!

By: Ron Clark, M.D., FACEP

Ron Clark, M.D., FACEP — Tue, 25 Dec 2012 04:12:42 +0000

Alex: Very good summary of the inertia of the old tech and the challenges for emerging new tech. My company QUICK, http://www.quickappcompany.com, is a new tech biomedical mobile application company. Your observation that “large companies spend billions on old technology because they don’t have the resources to try something new” is true, but interestingly, small companies who want to catapult to billion dollar large company status see limited resources as a motivation, and not a limitation, to innovate new products and concepts that make old tech products look dusty.

By: Robert Gao

Robert Gao — Tue, 25 Dec 2012 03:48:36 +0000

Inertia, somewhat kind of mankind nature, has been influencing the whole business world. To adopt start-up technology or not is not just a simple decision, which there expectedly exists complicated factors behind. That is why we call new technologies are disruptive!

By: Michael Southern

Michael Southern — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 23:37:18 +0000

Alex, as you find these companies, shout them out! I’ve manhandled all sorts of technology since 1983 and I’m looking for employment opportunities lol http://www.linkedin.com/in/mikesouthern

By: Raman Garg

Raman Garg — Sun, 23 Dec 2012 18:04:40 +0000

Enterprise IT teams have so many burning projects to deal with that these app migration plans just keep getting pushed back. In the IT Infrastructure, we are seeing that virtualization is doing its bit to help. Some of our clients have successfully virtualized old NT systems(as you mentioned in the post). So small changes are paving the way :).