The document discusses potential future trends in information technology, including: - Many current assumptions may be wrong, such as the death of corporate IT or storage limits being reached. Emerging technologies like RSS or social networks may not become as popular as expected. - Some technologies like standalone applications may disappear permanently while lightweight, modular cloud-based software and mashups could become more common. - Disruptive technologies that create new markets or transform existing large markets may emerge. Growth trends in consumers, mobile devices, sensors, online advertising and data-driven sciences are also discussed.

1. The Future of the Future
Whither IT?
Paul Kedrosky
February 20, 2007

2. Some Discussion “What Ifs”
• What if …
– A lot of what we know is wrong
• Corporate IT isn’t dead
• Storage isn’t over
• Microsoft doesn’t matter
• Google isn’t all-powerful
• Consumers aren’t that hard to market to
• Telecom is set for a resurgence

3. Some Contrarian “What Ifs”
• What if …
– A lot of what is ‘hot’ isn’t
• RSS
• Photo sharing
• Social networks
• YouTubes of
– Some things are gone forever
• Binary apps
• Siloed enterprise apps

4. Some Things to Look For
• Lightweight modular software
– Mash-ups using SOA versus monolithic enterprise
apps
• Short sales cycle – 3-9 months at most
• Disruptive technology or business solution
– Create new markets
– Or, transform a $10B market to $1B
• And the usual
– People and market
– Growth and momentum

5. Gartner 2007 Overview

6. Consumers: Pace of Diffusion

7. Consumer Technologies
Took Walkman 10
years to reach
same cumulative
sales milestone!

8. Open Source

10. Traffic Changes
• Significant increase in traffic
• Increase in per-flow bandwidth
• Increase in per-flow duration

11. Network Snapshot
• Companies
– Limelight CDN estimates 150Gbps traffic (just
launched terrabyte network)
– YouTube 20Gbps within first year, going to
80Gbps build just for near-term growth
• Trends
– Many analysts “conservatively” forecasting
near-term traffic growth of 75% y-o-y

12. Surprised in the Enterprise

13. Misplaced Priorities?

14. Slow E2.0

15. Consumers & Mobile
By 2010 there will exist about 5 billion "mobile endpoints,"
or devices ranging from digital music players and
camera phones to gaming consoles and Web-enabled
cars.

16. Sensors & Ubiquitous Computing
Just as the personal computer was a symbol of the
’80s, and the symbol of the ’90s is the World
Wide Web, the next nonlinear shift, is going to
be the advent of cheap sensors.
-Paul Saffo, Institute for the Future

17. Online Advertising

18. Spam & Zombies

19. “Out There” Stuff
• “Data-aware” computing
– Scientific workflows automatically migrate towards systems
where the required datasets already reside or can be quickly
obtained
• High Throughput Genomics
– Next generation sequencing technologies causing massive
increase in the sheer volume of data available to researchers
– A single lab machine produces around 1 billion bases per day
– Data centers can’t keep up
• Predictive and systems biology
– Increasing trend toward data-driven drug discovery

20. paul@kedrosky.com