Another law: Bessemer's Law

Writing on the new HTML5-standard in the Nov/Dec Technology Review Magazine, David Cowan claims the discovery of a new law - Bessemer's Law - that describes the falling costs of developing a full-blown e-commerce site:

"In 1995--at the dawn of the commercial Web--it cost about $20 million to develop, test, secure, and scale an e-commerce application. The time and money required to launch a scalable, secure commercial Web service has since dropped by half every two years, thanks to new technologies like Java, Apache, Adobe Flash, AJAX, XML, Amazon cloud servers, and soon HTML5. Today, $150,000 is a sufficient engineering budget to launch an online startup. This opens the door for entrepreneurs, but it challenges them later, when they need to attract people, capital, and customers in a market crowded with startups."

RAEM