Nice topic about the decline of traditional expert forums - and traditional services.
On my daily business I see a closing gap between developers and administrators. And a closing gap between bare bone providers and service providers.
Starting with devops.
The Agile Manifesto and the DevOps story did a big bang on the way systems are developed and deployed. Even Microsoft did get that bang and moved their Azure service from "VMWare to the clouds" to a real SaaS environment.
Things like
that make administrators unnecessary for most traditional jobs. They do have time for new jobs like redudancy, performance tests, penetration tests, monitoring, scaling. But they won't install servers or databases any longer. They tune them, they monitor them but they don't get paid to click on the next buttons.
Same change for developers. They don't re-event wheels but connect complex system. All about interfaces, dtos, transactions, transformations, sessions and plugin customizing. You don't start from scratch. There are systems running on the client side and you have to integrate any new solution into the allready working environment.
It is about speed too and about certifications. Project times getting shorter. Their focus changing into deep hassle-less integration. More plugins and less custom workaroud-ish code.
Pay-as-you-go SaaS is the elevator for automatic system deployments, automatic data transformation and plugin chains for integrated workflows. They need a CRM two days a week and a campain management two days a month. And they are only paying the days they are using the systems. No time and no money left to install and configure dedicated servers. No time and money to install a CRM per user.
Braking it down to one simple requirement: They don't care about servers or software. They want a running service.
You don't build your own nuclear power plant any longer to have light at noon. You just buy the power you need. And you only pay what you use.
Departments in midsize and big corps do the same. They skip the servers, administrators, developers and just rent a CRM system or an exchange server.
They still need highly skilled administrators and developers to customize and monitor that stuff but they don't need them to run the stuff.
And even if you have to pay $50 per account per month it is cheaper. Much cheaper than 5 people costing around $15.000 per month.
Comparing wages to Rackspace, Azure, AWS prices .. hell you get a lot for $15.000 per month from them.
So selling services is much more profit-yielding than just selling servers or software.
Looking to my own habbits I am still old school and nostalgic.
E.g. I am running my own mail servers.
Paying for vps and paying for my time handling them. Second one is something that I should stop. If I think about how much money I can earn doing something for my job comparing to the time of handling the vps, the operating system, postfix, dovecot, upgrades, ...
It is my hobby. It is a good feeling to have full controll. But it is lost time doing things that someone else can handle by tools fully automated.
$40 per year for a vps or $40 per year for a fully managed exchange account.
That is the reason why I do feel nostalgic. Because it is like someone constructing his own car instead of renting one three days a month - when he really needs it.
