Wisdom of the crowd | Which key technology should you adopt over the next five years?

For a company, picking the wrong trends to follow can make life difficult or lead to disaster. If, at the start of this decade, you invested in strategies based on using fax machines or standalone videophones, DAT, WAP or DAB, "push technologies" or paperless offices, then you might not have done as well as if you'd chosen blogging, social networking, or a user-generated content strategy. You've been invited to a meeting to decide what will be the most important technology for your company in the next five-10 years. What do you pick, and why? • Mobile and location-based services are the only one I'd put money on. dvdhldn • Looks like a game of BS bingo to me. Current buzzwords du jour in my place are "SaaS", "virtualisation" and anything that's in the "cloud". If you can virtualise a service by placing it on the internet (and thus, in the cloud), you get a triple-word score. BarryMcC • I'm putting my money on the Sinclair C5 making a comeback. tigerdraught • I feel there is a massive future in the games industry, with the next step being real-time 3D rendering with the current-gen console (probably not now, but definitely in the next set of consoles in about three-four years) YoungPayters • The one I'd really put my money behind would be cloud computing. There's a lot of small IT companies out there running their own servers and wasting a lot of money doing so. I'd be surprised if, 10 years from now, any of these companies still own their own server hardware. I suspect e-book readers will eventually take off, but they need to seriously come down in price – under $100 would probably be the breakthrough point. Barry841 • Domestic solar power has to be in there

Go here to see the original: 
Wisdom of the crowd | Which key technology should you adopt over the next five years?

Microsoft’s Azure is not Hailstorm, but what’s the point of it?

Microsoft has made its Azure cloud computing announcements at PDC, so now we know what it's doing: it is extending Windows 2008 Server into the online market so that programmers who develop applications in Visual Studio (and other things, see below) can test them locally and deploy them globally . Azure runs the same code but uses a hypervisor to distribute it across multiple machines and, next year, multiple data centres on different continents. Application management is automatic

The rest is here:
Microsoft's Azure is not Hailstorm, but what's the point of it?