When Will IT Technology Mature?

If you step back for a moment and away from the breakneck speed with which the Internet and IT has developed over the last 15 years, you realize that IT in general is a still a very immature market. Mature markets have certain characteristics and one is that at some point seemingly endless cycles of innovation begin to fade. At the same time,  technology curves, products, and end user familiarity and comfort levels with knowing how to actually use the products involved (there's a concept!) settles in to a known model with reasonably predictable characteristics.

Microsoft’s Vista saga is a good example of the beginning of the end of a self-fulfilling sales and innovation cycle that has reached a point of diminishing returns. It may mark a segue into a more mature phase in that segment but I doubt it. Given what we know about the impact of cloud and virtualization on IT today, it’s much more likely that we’re just entering into a new phase of even more disruptive innovation. To anyone reading this who was hoping for things to settle down a bit, sorry, I just don’t see it happening. But it does point to the need for IT professionals to constantly upgrade skill sets.

So if IT is showing no signs of really maturing as a market, (at least according to the way I’ve defined market maturity), what can we expect? For starters, innovation will continue to be radical. Cloud computing, virtualization, IT/telecom convergence and multicore on the technology side combined with more robust and pervasive (i.e. wireless) communications in the middle and then unprecedented levels of end user empowerment, processing power, and creativity on both the consumer and business side using Web 2.0 and social networking tools. It’s a volatile mix for continuing radical change (and that doesn’t even factor in the imploding global economy). Fasten your seat belts.

Posted by Tom Valovic on 11/20/2008 at 12:49 PM