Shocking Result For 'Revolutions Of Next Decade' Poll

Out of 61 votes, 41% went for open source as being the revolutionizing factor for 2010-2020. I disagree - it will be the cloud.

I am not saying that open source will not be massively important over the next decade and a bit. It will be at least as important as it already has been. However, I see no revolution. The time for that has past. If Linux had made a huge land grab when Vista let down Microsoft's guard, then things could have been different. But Linux did nothing of the sort. Indeed, the latest offerings (KDE 4 for example) are going in strange and unhelpful directions. So, Linux, MySQL and the other open source players have done their revolutionizing. They have shown that the big commercial players need to keep innovating and cannot 'stitch up' the marketplace. Continuing to do this is important and a huge role for open source, but not revolutionary.

In my view it is the cloud which will revolutionize the world of IT over the next decade and more. In some ways it will be computing gone full circle. But it will also be computing for the masses. Desktop and laptop computers are already really just thin clients to the Internet servers. This will become ever more so whilst computer power will aggregate from our current multiplicity of servers to a few huge clouds. We will think of paying for compute power in cycles not servers (like the old main frame days - think MIPS). Corporate users will be allocated pools of resource in clouds (think main frame regions). In 10 years time the idea of running a word processor on your own machine will be as daft of running an email server on your own machine is now. The future is the cloud... IHMO

- AJ