The New Medicis

Courtesy of Om Malik, see these posts on WIFI in San Francisco and rural Oregon. What is fascinating is the wide range of players competing and the creativity of the funding proposals. If politicians and conservative public sector executives can try this, corporate CIOs can too. They can complain about how much of budget gets eaten up by incumbent providers and worry about industry M&A -  but if they just start evaluating open source, offshore, rural, third party maintenance, SaaS, wireless, telemetry, BPO and other providers and challenge them to come up with creative funding, migration alternatives, they often will. CIOs can become the new Medicis, patrons of Michelangelo and Galileo - benefactors of the New Florence.