Keeping up to date

When it comes to IT, things develop and change at a tremendous rate and cloud services are likely to increase this tempo. The thing that impacted the rate of change was the speed by which customers could apply updates. Vendors do not want to upset customers by changing so quickly that, as soon as they have deployed the latest edition, there is already another version released. Not only do you want to avoid frustrating users with the tempo of deploying updates, but also, as a software vendor, you do not want to be trying to support too many versions of a product. All of this disappears when offered as a cloud service, as the vendor will be conducting the updates for you. As the vendor has control of the deployment of updates, they can keep everyone up-to date, simplifying things for them. This means that we will see a heightened arms race by  cloud providers. This is great for us as customers, as we will see more and more capability in the short term; but for us as authors...