I had a great conversation this week with Julian Shaw of http://www.arithmo.co.uk/ , which is a new accounting vendor in the “cloud” the UK. The fact that they have created an excellent accounting solution online is nothing new, but what I really enjoyed was discussing how he actually aims to get traffic to use his solution. Which goes back to an earlier post of mine about creating a great web site but not being able to get people to use it. The questions that arose for me, and I believe may be common to all of us in the same position, were:
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How many of us are out there as vendors all racing to get the latest and greatest ideas into the cloud, and at what rate are people joining the race?
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Is this a return to the 90’s where people are racing for “unique visits” to their sites to create perceived shareholder value, or is this a sign of society maturing to genuinely adopt online computing?
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Is there potential for another “.com bubble burst” equivalent, ie is history about to repeat itself and leave behind another graveyard of web 2.0 websites alongside all those that died in the late 90’s and early 2000’s?
My conversation confirmed that we are all grappling with the same issues, but we all share in the excitement of what cloud computing offers for the future.
