It’s the end [of 2008 and the start of 2009], and that’s a good instance to take stock of what’s been happening in business technology, and think about where trends might be going.

In one sense, the big players seem to hang on and get bigger. Apple hardly takes a bite out of the PC’s world dominance. Google is still number one in searches. And business pretty much runs on Microsoft Office. I don’t expect any of the market leaders to fade, but the battles will design as they try to get into each other’s spaces.

So my first prediction is that Google will succeed in stealing away some office functionality from Microsoft. Gmail and a broader Google product called Google Apps, which includes word processing and spreadsheets, will take the place of Microsoft’s Exchange and Office software in more and more companies.

Of course, it’s very early in that battle. Microsoft has 90 percent to 95 percent of the market for office applications and handles 62 percent of large corporation’s e-mail, according to research firm Gartner. But Google has a way of practically giving things away to achieve market penetration.

Google can offer software cheaply while doing all the work on its servers. that is called “cloud computing,” which is running software by the Web from massive info centers. IBM and Amazon.com additionally compute in the clouds, and I think that trend is well under way. In the future, we won’t care who owns or operates our software, we will just use it by the World Wide Web.

Computers themselves are getting less expensive. You’ve probably heard of the project to create a $100 laptop for Third World students that is powered by a hand-cranked electric generator. that has already spawned a number of under-$500 laptops and I see that accelerating. It should be fairly soon…

[Source] dhiram