Big-Think on the Future of IT

Three recent stories on the state of enterprise technology caught my eye.

Tom Siebel says IT's glory days are over. No new technological advances, he believes, would impel I.T. customers to replace the computer technology they already had: "I would suggest to you that most of what's going on today is not very exciting." To whatever extent that's true, it doesn't address the need to use technology more efficiently within the enterprise, which is the point of the other two articles.

SAP says it's sticking with its software strategy: "I have never, ever heard a customer expressing the faintest wish for having everything delivered out of one hand," [CEO Leo] Apotheker said in an interview. "Someone is probably trying to imagine wishes that they would like to hear."

And Microsoft has a new not-so-secret weapon:

"SharePoint is saving Microsoft's Office business even as it paves the way for a new era of Microsoft lock-in," said Matt Asay, an executive at Alfresco, which makes an open-source content management system. "It is simultaneously the most interesting and dangerous Microsoft technology, and has largely caught its competitors napping."

Along these lines, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive, has talked about SharePoint as the company's next big operating system.