68% of the Fortune 100 are Clueless

Last month, 37Signals noticed that they were getting lots of emails and signups from people with Fortune 500 email addresses. They dug around and found that Basecamp was being used at:

What’s notable about this is that 37Signals employs no salespeople and doesn’t take anyone at these companies out to expensive dinners.

This is a brilliant example of a theme we obsess over:

The cloud is democratizing IT and the adoption of cloud services (or “tools that just plain work”) is being driven by end-users, not by IT policy or management.

I ran into a startling example of this a couple of weeks back when I was at a party with a number of people from the same startup. I asked the guy who runs their IT how much they spend on the cloud a month. His response: next to nothing, maybe two hundred bucks.

Not ten minutes later I ran into one of the developers for that same company. I asked him the same question. His response: Close to $5,000.

This crazy ride we’re all on— the growth of the zero cloud to ubiquitous cloud— is not being driven by any policy … it’s just viral. Why? Because it’s easier to sign-up for the services you really need at the moment you really need them rather than go through official channels and wait.  via http://su.pr/2GBVZl / @cloudability

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