I'm posting this from PC Forum, Esther Dyson's premier conference on directions in technology. You may consider this post controversial; if so, or if you agree, feel free to "blog back" or contact me directly. Nobody has told me yet that I'm totally wrong although comments are coming in... [updated March 20, 2005]

• "A PC on every desk and in every home" (Bill Gates, Paul Allen, 1975)
• "A [friendly] computer for the rest of us" (Steve Jobs, 1984)
• "The internet is going to be ... a revolutionary new way of doing business." (Jim Clark, 1994)

It's again ten years later, and we've lived through the worst crash in the technology industry's history. But does this fully explain where we are? This industry feels to me like it is hanging in suspended animation, waiting for something, but not knowing for what, whether it will be a good or a bad thing, and hiding its head under the covers just in case it might be hit by something hard.

Where are the big, hairy, audacious, even outrageous goals that used to inspire everybody? That made this the industry to be in, for the fun and importance of it? The goal of putting a computer on every desk was of course outrageous in 1975, but it galvanized a generation. They proved the skeptics wrong and the world became a better place because of it. Many other innovations followed the same pattern: e-mail and on-line forums, desktop publishing, dare I say it: e-commerce. And many others.

But is there anything as important today? What technologies are you evangelizing today to everybody who would listen (or not)? What gets you going, down to your toes (as Built To Last would call it), because you really believe it is important? A list of candidates in 2005 might read like this:

• The iPod. Great business for Apple. This must be a top cause. Instead of listening to the radio, the walkman, or the portable CD player, we can now listen to a hard drive.... excuse my asking, but how exactly does that change the world? It's a great product, but does it really matter as, say, the Mac mattered that brought computing "to the rest of us"?
• Digital Identity. Important for enterprises, sure. But does it make anybody jump out of their seats, for reasons other than being afraid of having no more privacy and being correlated and marketed to 24x7?
• Web Services. There clearly was a need to advance from CORBA and COM. But who other than die-hard technologists can even explain what it is? (and none of them agree either). "Galvanizing everybody" is not the word that comes to my mind, even to die-hard technologists...

The list goes on, and it's a pale shadow of what such a list looked like 10, 20 and even 30 years ago.

[Many people do get excited today about social phenomena, e.g. blogging and projects like WikiPedia. But fundamentally, these are not about technology — everybody agrees that their technology is basically trivial and has been around for a long time. The fact that we sometimes mistake them for technology underscores the very point I'm trying to make here. It's like if Bill Gates' big goal would have been to change the social dynamics between young MBAs and corporate management types because the PC would enable Visicalc... That would indeed have been a pale shadow of what his generation's big hairy audacious goal actually was: to change the entire world by stretching the technological envelope. Which they did.]

Some have concluded that this is what happens when an industry matures, when everybody who's ever going to own a PC has one already, when most enterprise applications have been sold that will be sold and all business comes from replacement and mainstream customer service rather than innovation. They are saying, in so many words: information technology has run its course, it has become inherently boring like coal or steel or ship building, because it cannot and will not change the world any more.

I absolutely disagree. In fact, I'm outraged when I hear that kind of thing, as I'm sure you must be if you are reading this blog ;-) Information technology is not like any other technology: it is all about the same stuff as our thoughts! Information is at the very heart of anything we are and do, and will ever be or do as humans. Once biotech has reached its big hairy audacious goal of building life from scratch, do you want to bet whether they will have invested more in lab equipment or information technology? Even once we shed our bodies (for the sci-fi freaks reading this) and run on quantum-gravitational buckyballs of pure energy (or whatever) instead of on silicon or meat, one can forget many other technologies like ship building and even biotech, but information, and technology to process it will remain as critical as ever! Even here and now, any progress in any discipline is increasingly and totally dependent on information technology, and more so than it ever was.

So think about this next time you consider changing industries or investing in pork bellies instead: we simply have no reason to believe that there is a lack of opportunity in information technology, because this indeed is the golden age of information, which is growing at a rate that is absolutely staggering. So why all the funk in this information technology industry of ours?

I've been struggling with this question since about 2001. First, I blamed it on the technology downturn and the fact that so many new, new things turned out to consist only of hot air. A blacklash was unavoidable. But it is 2005 now, the memory of dot-bombs has receded and we are still in the same funky place. There must be a better explanation, and recently, I think I have found one ...

The information technology opportunity is alive and well, but not for the kind of information technology that we all grew up with.

Follow me down that route for a second: If the types of information technology systems that we've been building, up to now, fundamentally cannot address the opportunities as they unfold today, then, indeed, this industry looks like it has "matured" and no inspiring challenges remain. People only work on incremental improvements of well-known applications, nothing new happens, the incumbents win every deal, we see rapid commoditization, ever-more-expensive sales cycles and so forth. Which is exactly what we are seeing in most sectors of this market.

By way of analogy, take the mainframe market before the PC showed up. I'm a little too young to have experienced this first hand, but I bet it felt quite like today's information technology market: stodgy, and not much fun any more. That was because the mainframe architecture (a secret club of high priests being in control of the machine) fundamentally could not address the opportunity that was around the corner: to broaden the market into much more of a mass market. It took an entirely new set of people (the Bills and Steves of the world), an entirely new architecture (a personal computer under the control of an individual), a new value proposition (empowerment of the information worker), and the chutzpa to ignore learned lessons because they did not apply any more ("You can't even run an accounts-payable application on this toy of yours!"). The new opportunity turned out to be there, several times larger than the entire information technology market at that time, but those thinking traditional thoughts — mainframe thoughts — could not see it and might as well have gone trading pork bellies instead ...

Could history be repeating itself? I think it is and it must: how else could you explain the exploding need for ever-better product (information) while the equipment makers for that product (information technology vendors) are in a big funk?

I think it is time for us in this industry to take a hard look at what the technologies we've produced, and that are currently being advocated, can really do to advance the goals of our users going forward, given that this is the 21st century and lots has changed since we came up with the so-called "state of the art". Personally, I have come to the conclusion that the mainstream trajectory of this industry will most likely produce ever-more complex edifices like the WS-* web services specs, but somehow be completely oblivious to the fundamental changes in the environment in which today's technologies need to work in.

Consider these current trends:

• Imagine your house with 10-100 times as many chips in it as today, all networked, as it certainly will be the case (WiFi cards have reached $10 retail already). The time that an information technology user is going to spend interacting with those chips — 24 hours a day — is going to dwarf the time they spend surfing the web or running business applications. As an industry, we haven't even the faintest clue how to develop, distribute, install, maintain, upgrade, service, and add value to ubiquitous, smart devices that can communicate with each other. But: growth is not going to come from the mainframe ... excuse me, I mean growth is not going to come by doing the same thing (client-server business applications, web or not, with the PC as a front end and what have you) that we've become so comfortable with.
• Throughout society, hierarchical organization is giving way to meritocratic, peer relationships. The information technology industry is one of the very few places left where centralization is still considered the way to go: even darling Google built the most centralized system you can think of. There was a brief romance with decentralized architectures around 2000, but due to the unfortunate war with Big Copyright, they largely have all died out. But centralization creates stovepipes (use your Friendster social network at Netflix, anybody?) and the integration of stovepipes is the largest expense in IT land today. Do we really believe that client-server stovepipes hooked together by a little bit of duct tape are going to meet the needs of a networked society where every member is different and has different, dynamically changing relationships with people all around the world?
• There are now about 1.7 billion active mobile phone subscribers world-wide, carrying their devices close to 24 hours a day, compared to less than 700 million PC users, sitting in front of the box for, well, a lot less time every day. How much of today's installed base of software, or even software being built today, really is at least 2.5 times more appealing on mobile devices than it is on PCs? Do we somehow have our priorities wrong? Those mobile users shell out probably north of half a trillion dollars every year mostly for talking ... it's not like they are not willing to pay. But porting existing applications to mobile devices, by and large, is now known not to be acceptable to those mobile users, while throwing out the billions and maybe trillions in IT investment we have in place obviously is not an option either. So ...?

Are these questions that need answering? Do we need new ideas, or do we just believe we can keep going the same way we have, given the funk we are in?

I think it is time to take action. I think it is time to re-think some cherished notions, from who our users are and what they want, through what activities and scenarios need to be supported going forward given the changing behaviors of our users and their circumstances, to what the architectures are that can deliver value to them. I also think that when everything is said and done, it will look like a creative re-interpretation of what we have already, as part of a true global information architecture that's always-on, always-realtime, always-up-to-date, all devices, ubiquitous, context-aware, semantically aware, supporting everybody all the time, unobtrusively, while ensuring security and — hopefully — privacy as well as possible.

Obviously, as NetMesh, we want to play a role in this, and have some specific ideas and plans about that that we consider highly interesting (Situational Software ... The Real-time Information Grid and all that that entails ...) However, none of this is my point with this post. This post is about the future of this information technology industry of ours. It's about rekindling the spirit that made this the world's most dynamic and most interesting industry, ever. It's about aligning demand and supply in a changing world. And yes, it's about making the world a better place, and the drive and the cause to will it to happen.