what's this decade's highlight?

Whilst working on the white papers, been thinking about this new trend in the industry of looking at IT in a 'holistic' manner. The 'On-demand' business promoted by IBM or HP's 'Adaptive Enterprise' is not that much different form the organic computing endavours carried out by researchers and academics, and they are all converging with the AI project ideas that have been floating around for decades now. The difference is that miniaturisation of electronics components, the quality of embedded software, new virtualisation techniques and the progress in understanding neurology and microbiology might allow for all of these concepts to slot into place.

If you learned programming in the 80's, it was all about modular programming, and the 'GO TOs' became a dirty word. The 90's brought into prominence the object oriented programming. The 'on-demand' ultimately followed up by 'organic' computing might become the descriptive keywords for the start of this century...