Startups Continue to Seed IT Innovation

by Beth Cohen

Unless you have been buried under a rock for the past eight years, you have probably noticed that practically all of the revolutionary IT products and hot services that get the big buzz are being developed directly for the consumer sector. Think about all of the great new products -- wireless LAN, instant messaging, Web 2.0, social networking, MP3 players, PDA technology, flash drives, and cloud computing (yes even cloud computing, which is mostly a means for Google and Amazon to recoup some of their excess capacity investments). All are examples of technologies that originated as products designed for the consumer market that have since been adopted by the enterprise. The truth is that there has been little IT innovation created directly for the business market since the dot-com meltdown in 2001 (virtualization does not count, as I view it as a reinvention of some very old ideas).