When does innovation occur ? When the tools that drive and facilitate the innovations are available in a state of maturity. What does innovation mean ? It means a lot of things, but most importantly what it means can be summarised as:

• Increased quality (and utility) of the product
• Reduction in cost (cost to consumer and cost of production)
• Scalable products which are easily commoditised
• Affordable commodities

In fact the above can be wrapped in the catchall term as qualities of innovation. Thus, a lowering of prices and/or complexity of the tools that lead to lowering of the development barriers result in an increase in the entropy mix of innovation. So where does this fit in ? It fits in the scheme of things of the (in)elegantly termed LongTail. The current tools that enable creation, maintenance and deployment of solutions have reached a state of maturity that will enable a larger number of small developer outfits to develop and deploy FOSS based applications. Couple this with v12n (virtualisation) and it is no longer necessary for the application to keep on chasing and being autobuilt for the base operating system. This is perhaps as good a time as any to start thinking in terms of application stacks that bundle along with the operating system and sit as a guest stack on a virtualised platform.