The Future History of Small Business
I’ve been working with computers for 40 years(!), going back to 1967 when I was 16 and my school got a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-8/S. * It had 4,000 bytes of memory, and a teletype as the user-interface.
[*The ‘/S’ actually stood for ‘slow.’ You would be correct if you guessed that this was a more forthright era in the evolution of tech, before marketing got involved!]
The rate of change since then has been astounding, and everywhere you look you see the impacts of that change: information technology is deeply woven into the very fabric of our work, and our lives. In fact, a Happy Meal giveaway toy today has far more power than that room-filling machine from the ’60s.
Yet while small business has been quick to adopt computers, it really hasn’t been anywhere near the leading edge in terms of reaping the full benefits of information technology.
Now that’s all changing because of something called “on-demand software,” also known as “Software as a Service” or SaaS. The big idea behind SaaS is that the software sits on a server in a datacenter, and you use it over the Internet via a web browser.
SaaS is one of those marvelous things that’s nearly 100% upside. It is far more secure, and far easier to manage, than desktop software, and the fact that it lives on the Internet means that you can use it from anywhere. Best of all, it can tie together everyone in an organization, no matter where they are or what they do.
Big businesses have been using SaaS (and its ancestor “thin-client software”) for years, because they could see the benefits and they had the infrastructure to deploy it. Lots of research has been done about this, but the bottom line is that those big companies used IT to differentiate themselves from their big competitors, and as a consequence really widened the technology gap between large and small business.
Now, because of the widespread availability of high-speed broadband connections, small businesses are finally in a position to benefit from the SaaS movement. (As an aside, ubiquitous broadband was the big bet that we placed five years ago when we decided to create NetBooks.)
Of course, “fat pipes” (as broadband connections are often called) aren’t enough. History shows that the kinds of solutions that work in big companies just aren’t a good fit for small businesses. It’s not just that they’re too expensive; they’re extremely complicated – just like the organizations they serve!
Small businesses aren’t just small; they’re really different than their big brethren. But those fat pipes are an enabler, and finally on-demand software is beginning to emerge that is designed for the needs of the country’s 5+ million small businesses.
For 40 years, every time a new wave of technology comes along I’ve found myself thinking “it can’t get better than this,” and the SaaS wave is no different. What is different this time is that I expect when we look back in five or 10 years we’ll mark 2007 as the moment when the tide began to turn in favor of small businesses.
