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Some say that the technical platform future lies with commodity-based blade computers.
Yet others say that software as a service will drive us towards a socket-in-the-wall mentality where all computer requirements are served by hosted managed solutions.
Are any of these right? On their own, probably not. What is more likely is that they will all be right in one way or another.
As an analogy, I would like to use the history of our planet, and how the mountains and plains have emerged over time.
Right back at the beginning, we had a spinning ball of debris with little topographical detail - which we can compare to the pre-computer days of abacuses, tally sticks, log tables and slide rules, but nothing very big.
The planet then consolidated and formed a hard crust, with contents that over a period of billions of years crashed into each other, creating huge mountain chains (for us, mainframes).
On these mountains, luxurious flora flourished, much like the specialised applications written by the early developers who had no need to worry about standards and interoperability.
Away from the edges of the main activity, large areas of relative stability remained as plains (the majority of companies, which did not use computers at all).
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