Interesting perspective on TechCrunch by Marc Benioff (of Salesforce fame) on the iPad and the Cloud:
The future of our industry now looks totally different than the past. It looks like a sheet of paper, and it’s called the iPad. It’s not about typing or clicking; it’s about touching. It’s not about text, or even animation, it’s about video. It’s not about a local disk, or even a desktop, it’s about the cloud. It’s not about pulling information; it’s about push. It’s not about repurposing old software, it’s about writing everything from scratch (because you want to take advantage of the awesome potential of the new computers and the new cloud—and because you have to reach this pinnacle). Finally, the industry is fun again.
It’ll be interesting to see what the iPad and devices inspired by it do for the world of ELNs. Clearly Marc’s got a very cloud-centric perspective but the success of Salesforce.com (which he launched when Enterprise software was very much a 3-teir world client/server affair) does mean he’s worth listening to.
