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One of the biggest selling points of cloud computing is that it levels the playing field for small companies to compete with bigger ones in terms of IT infrastructure. Well, I will go one step further and argue that cloud computing helps players in developing countries to compete on a par with those in more advanced nations. It helps both the individuals and businesses in the developing world and I want to highlight this compelling story here in this blog. For the sake of brevity, I will split this post into two parts. In the first part, I will talk about how cloud computing can empower individual developers, and in the second part, I will discuss how it helps businesses in these countries compete in a global economy.
A few months back, I was reading a New York Times story about the impact of the iPhone in places like Nairobi in Africa. No, Apple didn’t release the iPhone in Nairobi. The story is about a 22 year old developer in Kenya who developed an iPhone app using the online iPhone simulator. During the interview with the reporter, he said something that struck me about the kind of transitions we are making in our world due to rapid technological advances, in general, and cloud computing, in particular. Let me quote the developer here.
Even if I don’t have an iPhone,” Mr. Mworia says defiantly, “I can still have a world market for my work.
This is a very powerful statement about the changes technology has brought into this world. The non-availability of the iPhone didn’t matter to this person in Kenya. The Internet cloud provided him an opportunity to use an online simulator hosted in a far away country and develop the app using his knowledge (which can also be honed with the help of world class universities by virtually attending the classes through the internet).
This is not unique to Mr. Mworia alone. With the proliferation of cloud computing technologies, millions of developers from the developing countries are in a position to compete directly with developers working from a garage in Silicon Valley or Colorado or New York. In my first post, here at Cloud Ave, I talked about Platform as a Service (PaaS) and how it helps developers scale their app easily. These Platform as a Service offerings can help developers in the developing world in ways unimaginable till a couple of years back.
In the traditional world, the developers in these countries had to subscribe to a shared hosting plan to showcase their apps. For many developers, the cost of shared hosting alone was prohibitive enough to bury their dreams and creations even before they could conceptualize them. Even for those who managed to get a shared hosting plan, either by doing extra hours of hard work or by borrowing money from friends and relatives, it was next to impossible to scale their app as they couldn’t afford to rent dedicated servers or clusters needed for scaling. The economic disparity in the world had put the developers in the developing countries at a disadvantaged position, ending their dreams even before it began.
With the advent of Platform as a Service, especially with services like Google App Engine and others, the situation has changed drastically. Now a developer sitting in Kenya or a rural village in India can compete with a developer working from Starbucks in Seattle. They can showcase their app for free and, as their app gets traction, they can scale for a very small fee (which can even be paid by the developer using the money he/she earns from Google ad services or similar ad services from other companies). The developer sitting in Kenya can now build an app that can be scaled to a level of a high end startup in the Valley without any need to raise money. This is the kind of playing field Adam Smith would have visualized while coming up with his market ideas.
This could only happen due to the emergence and proliferation of cloud computing. Companies like Google can offer free computing resources which are used by the developers in the developing world because these companies have technology that helps them scale at a very low cost. The low cost of hardware and the network, combined with the availability of easily scalable software architecture, allows them to offer an opportunity to the developers and help them bring their dreams to reality.
Do you think we are now seeing a leveling of playing field due to the advances in technology? Especially, I would like to hear from developers in the developing nations about how (or whether) they benefited from these technologies. If you have a success story to share, please contact us and we will try our best to highlight your story in this space.
[..] Here, at Cloud Ave, we have been emphasizing about how Cloud Computing levels the playing field for people across all sizes of businesses, across countries and in places where computing was an unknown term till recently. In my early days at Cloud Ave, I also wrote atwo [..]
Yes to a certain degree, but we should also take into consideration things like internet access and bandwidth. In most developing countries these infrastructures are not available and only for a certain category of people. So is the playing level not at the moment till all these things have been resolve (internet access and energy). There can be multiple clouds but what use are they if you cannot access them? regards
while going thru your post i found that you are emphasizing on the opportunity for developers of developing countries. I agree on this but one thing that always remains is that the whole IT infrastructure owner are the same old IT bigwig like Microsoft, Google, IBM, Amazon. Individual developers can get benefited developing application in the cloud but the small companies will suppressed. There will no be the space to play for local companies. The cloud service provider may provide services in more cheaper, better and secure way but always there exists the risk of logical data lock. If the cloud provider can provide many of the services free of cost that may benefited the general but again that will sweep away the job of local companies. The local IT infrastructure and services enterprises will be closed. This will have big impact in Developing Countries.
while going thru your post i found that you are emphasizing on the opportunity for developers of developing countries. I agree on this but one thing that always remains is that the whole IT infrastructure owner are the same old IT bigwig like Microsoft, Google, IBM, Amazon. Individual developers can get benefited developing application in the cloud but the small companies will suppressed. There will no be the space to play for local companies. The cloud service provider may provide services in more cheaper, better and secure way but always there exists the risk of logical data lock. If the cloud provider can provide many of the services free of cost that may benefited the general but again that will sweep away the job of local companies. The local IT infrastructure and services enterprises will be closed. This will have big impact in Developing Countries.
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