Cheaper Innovation

Innovation is getting cheaper for those on the web. 

Server costs are falling; better yet, cloud computing is making it cheaper and easier for startups to scale quickly and effectively.

Storage costs are continuing to fall as well.  As it gets cheaper and cheaper, more and more are giving it away for free. 

Microsoft's recently increased storage space on Windows Live Skydrive from 1GB to 5GB.  Google came out of nowhere and gave away 1GB of email storage with each Gmail account.  YouTube did it for video. 

I even remember the days when I was doing HTML work, hosting on GeoCities, AngelFire and others.  They were all competing with each other on how much space they could give away for free.  When I started 5 or 10mb was huge! Today that's paltry.

The Web 2.0 boom has been making it easier and cheaper to innovate.  More so, companies are quicker to get off the ground due to so many cheap, or free, ways of doing things.

Google Docs means free document collaboration.

Skype means free calls, even if its VOIP.

Skydrive means free 5GB of online storage and backup.  Share among colleagues.

Legal forms are standardized, cheap, and easily accessible.

And of course, the most important thing: Information!  Information on every topic is more abundant than ever, so much so that we are having problems sorting through it.