April 17, 2023
Cloud 2.0
@anthonycorletti

Cloud 2.0.

Something many teams and companies have promised, and in my opinion, few have delivered well.

So many companies are building the cloud serverless platform for X, but I think they’re missing the point.

In a previous post, I wrote about how unbundling and rebundling is a powerful way to make a difference in the lives of those you seek to change in the world of software applications.

Ultimately, I think the effort that these teams are making is with the best of intentions. However, I think many of them are building on the same curve, meeting the status quo of what problems exist today, and not looking for the next curve. So what’s the next curve.

Let's do a thought experiment.

What if you unbundled the best parts of the cloud serverless platform for X, and rebundled them with the best parts of the cloud serverless platform for Y?

You saved the developer time and energy from having to learn and manage two different platforms. Great! That's the point. Remove the hard infrastructure stuff for teams as they grow. Now we never have to worry about infrastructure though, it's all automated for us, awesome.

But the cost to enter the market with new software has effectively been reduced to zero. This is a good thing, right? Not quite.

I think that what you choose to work on is just as important as what you don't choose to work on. Make the one decision that removes one thousand decisions. It’s easier than ever to build something, but how do you know you’re building the right something?

With that in mind, does all this infrastructure automation help us with that problem? Does it help us remove decisions about which serverless platform is going to get us to the next curve? Nope.

These systems are where all our business data and metrics live right? What's stopping us from unifying that content with query layers that help us define leading indicators of product market fit? Connecting these serverless platforms together continues to separate meaningful data that should be in one spot.

I think this brings us into a brave new world of focusing on return on work, instead of return on investment.

Return on investment is a lagging indicator, it's a measure of success after the fact when we spend. But what if we could measure success before we spend with some likelihood of return? What if we could derive insights from trends that help us make better bets for what people will want in the future based on what's happening today?

I think this is where Cloud 2.0 should come in.

A Cloud 2.0 platform collects content across business functions like design, sales, and engineering, market trends, and user feedback/ behavior, and offers insight into what is working, what is not, what could pose significant risk, and what could be a significant opportunity.

We already have all the tools, they're sitting right in front of us, all that's left to do is to build, show, and tell.

Know of any companies that are doing this? I'd love to hear about them. Drop me a line on Twitter.

Cheers.