By Tom Standage
From the economic revolution to the railway age, throughout the period of electrification, the arrival of mass creation, and eventually to the knowledge age, a similar trend retains repeating itself. an exhilarating, vivid part of innovation and fiscal hypothesis is via a crash, and then starts an extended, extra stately interval within which the know-how is admittedly deployed properly. This number of surveys and articles from The Economist examines how some distance know-how has come and the place it's heading.Part one appears at issues akin to the “greying” (maturing) of IT, the growing to be value of safeguard, the increase of outsourcing, and the problem of complexity, all of that have extra to do with implementation than innovation. Part appears to be like on the shift from company computing in the direction of customer know-how, wherein new applied sciences now look first in customer devices equivalent to cell phones. subject matters coated will contain the emergence of the cell phone because the “digital Swiss military knife”; the increase of electronic cameras, which now outsell film-based ones; the starting to be measurement and significance of the video games and its ever-closer hyperlinks with different extra conventional components of the leisure undefined; and the social influence of applied sciences resembling textual content messaging, wireless, and digital camera phones. Part 3 considers which expertise will lead the subsequent nice section of technological disruption and specializes in biotechnology, power know-how, and nanotechnology.
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In the old world, we didn’t care if you were up and running, we only cared about the numbers,” says Mr Benioff, who cut his professional teeth at Oracle. ” A different kind of grey Shifting more of the implementation risk to vendors will profoundly change the nature of the software business. Wall Street will have to view software firms more like utilities, which tend to grow rather slowly if steadily. And, perish the thought, software bosses could get more boring. The tone in the industry may no longer be set by people such as Mr Ellison, but by more prudent and cerebral chief executives such as sap’s Henning Kagermann.
In the early days of electricity, for instance, most firms had to have their own generators. Now most can get their power from the grid. Similarly, he says, it would be surprising if in 20 years’ time most of it was not outsourced. Traditionally, companies wanting to invest in computer systems did not have much choice: they had to build and operate their own. To be sure, they could outsource the work to companies such as eds and ibm Global Services, but in technical terms that did not change much, M 19 THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY because such firms usually operate dedicated computer systems for each customer.
Users thus unwittingly sent half-finished screenplays, unsent letters and private diary jottings to their friends, sometimes with embarrassing results. Code Red, which also struck that month, was a worm that exploited a security vulnerability in Microsoft’s web-server software to spread from one server to another. Infected servers were programmed to flood the White House website with traffic for a week. A Patching it up The weakness that Code Red exploited had been discovered in June, and Microsoft had issued a software “patch” to correct it.