Excellent article on some of the macro-technology trends making bootstrapping even easier.

Quote:

The Web has since become a platform, and building new businesses on that platform is no longer a multimillion-dollar proposition. Most new Web businesses nowadays are started with less than half a million dollars, and it's rare to find one that wants to use money from an initial public offering to get to profitability.

The reason? Start-ups are leveraging nearly a decade's worth of work on technologies that are now not only proven, but also free, or very nearly so. Open-source software can now do nearly everything that Oracle, I.B.M. and Microsoft specialized in back in the 90's. And the cost of computing and bandwidth? You can now lease a platform that can handle millions of customers for less than $500 a month. In the 90's, such a platform would have run tens of thousands of dollars or more a month.