Since the beginning of time, one of the biggest problems for startups has been the cost of getting in to business in the first place.  In MBA speak we call this a “barrier to entry”.  IT has always had one of the lowest barriers to entry of any industry.  After all, while new manufacturers raise millions to build a factory, Michael Dell started building PCs in his basement.  While new hospitals negotiate tax breaks and zoning rules, Jack Dorsey through Twitr on a spare server.  While retailers buy up inventory and refurbish buildings, the FourSquare kids built a little app to check-in places on their iphones.  The cloud has turned the low barrier of entry in IT from a hurdle, to a child-proof gate, to a single brick on the side of a trail.

Amazon Cloud EC2 was the first to do this, Rackspace and others soon followed.  With Amazon EC2, as long as I had the software to run a server I only needed  a few pennies to get it hosted on some infrastructure.  The problem (if one can consider it a problem) was that there was a good chance that while Amazon could give me hundreds of servers at the blink of an eye, there’s a good chance that my application wasn’t built to be scalable.

Enter Google App Engine (and Force.com and Amazon EC3).  Google forces me to build my application on a scalable platform that plugs in to their grid.  This allows them to GIVE me 1 gigabyte of bandwidth  (up and down) and 6.5 CPU hours for free.  My application can easily scale to a terebyte of bandwidth (up and down) and the use of 72 CPUs (at speed) for a very reasonable fee.  This make barriers to entry for web applications a joke.  It’s as if someone gave every new entrepreneur the keys to a brand new factory just for expressing an interest.

This is one of the primary reasons that I am ridiculously excited to see what the next 10 years will yield in the technology space.  Literally the only bounds are our imaginations and our will to build new things.