1. The digital world will converge with the physical world: Starting in about 1995, the mantra was, “Everything is virtual. Geography is irrelevant”. But from 2008, factors such as your physical location will mean a lot. Cloud services will be increasingly aware of context, down to details such as time, weather, where a user is headed, and which friends or business colleagues are nearby.
2. The era of device-centric computing is over. Connectivity-centric computing will take centre stage. The question “When am I going to get that one device that does everything I can imagine?” will be flipped on its head as any number of devices will provide easy access to all services and content. Devices become interchangeable, with cloud services becoming the focal point.
3. Publishing will be democratised. A global internet population of 1.2bn people now has the tools to produce everything from books and magazines to music and videos. This represents a massive disruption of old publishing models. People will soon be able to print on demand any book ever published; warehouses of physical inventory in the publishing world will no longer be necessary.
4. Crowd-sourcing is going mainstream. Fortune 50 companies will access top talent on a global basis via the internet, saving millions of dollars in professional areas as diverse as accountants, advertising professionals, attorneys, engineers, etc. Reputation systems will lower the risks involved by exposing poor performers.
5. Enterprises will use radically different tools to make key business decisions, including systems to predict the future. A merger is taking place between the structured data that fuels business intelligence and the unstructured data of the web. This combination will advance business intelligence. At the same time, market-based systems enabling accurate predictions of the future will become common practice in the enterprise.
Shane Robison is executive vice president, chief strategy and technology officer, HP
