The future rarely comes out as expected. For one thing, it's never as futuristic as we had thought or hoped it would be. For another, while we make our way toward the future we've planned for ourselves, we get distracted by events we hadn't expected. Then there are all the hidden impracticalities we had assumed would resolve themselves, only they never do.
That's why we ended up with cyber space instead of outer space and self-driving cars rather than flying ones.
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Our detour from outer space to cyber space wasn't for a lack of desire to find a new frontier, but because we got distracted. The abstract world of online gaming turned out to be a helluva lot cheaper, easier, and quicker to get to, not to mention more comfortable, than going to Mars.
Our paucity of flying cars also isn't due to any loss of desire. It's a matter of practicality: A lot of drivers can't even figure out how to use their mirrors in two dimensions. Can you imagine them in traffic in three? As it turns out, making a car that drives itself turned out to be much easier.
So don't expect the future of IT to look like what the IT pundit class keeps nattering on about either: The cloud will not bring everything together so easily that a child or sales manager will be able to solve all their technology problems without help from those annoying geeks in IT who just keep complicating things.
No panacea, just good people doing hard work
The truth is, we annoying IT geeks aren't complicating anything. We don't need to. When it comes to technology, things manage to be complicated all by themselves. We just try to explain it and get it right.
Ignore the blamestorms and the pundits who sell snake oil. No panacea will painlessly solve any IT problem, and identifying someone as worthy of your ire solves nothing. These kinds of articles will waste your time if you read them and do nothing, and they'll waste your money and effort if you follow their advice.








