Bill Loumpouridis

Bill Loumpouridis

In case you missed it, over the summer Gresso announced the release of a diamond-encrusted iPhone 4.

While there is always a market catering to the egos of hyper-rich, it made me realize that what Apple has done is democratize technology on a level that is absolutely unprecedented. If Warren Buffett decided to spend his entire fortune tomorrow to find a  “better” cell phone, he could not buy a better cell phone with better apps. He could buy a better case from Gresso, but the phone itself is the same one that you or I could buy at our local Verizon or AT&T store. This is the same phone that will be obsolete in 2-3 years because of the amazing innovation machine that Apple sustains.

That’s democratization.

It’s not just the phone itself, either. It’s the access to continuous innovation. The App Store ecosystem is an unprecedented cauldron of curiosity, innovation and genius. While I’m using Apple as the poster-child for democratization, the same is absolutely true of the mobile phones included in the Android ecosystem.

In many ways the Cloud has done the exact same thing for Enterprise IT. For the first time companies with small IT budgets have economical access to Cloud-based infrastructures and applications worth billions. They have access to the greatest security expertise on a time-shared basis. While the milk is not free, it’s silly to even consider buying the golden calf.

Is building out a new corporate data center the moral equivalent of purchasing a $30,000 Gresso iPhone? In most cases, my opinion would be yes, it is. There is a reason that cloud infrastructure companies like Rackspace and GoGrid are displacing corporate data centers: for most businesses, the subscription model for infrastructure is far more economical and enabling than traditional on-premise solutions. And access to the constant innovation for load balancing, performance and security represents democratized access on an unprecedented scale. Far too appealing to pass up.