Get Ready for Exciting Changes in Technology in Next 10 Years

Reimagined productivity apps, more diversity in the workforce and Cisco getting stronger in next 10 years Ten years ago, there were no smartphones. It was the coffee shop era of Wi-Fi, which meant that the Internet was just beginning to follow us out the door and into the world. Amazon first released Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), to some confusion. Nowadays, of course, Wi-Fi and mobile data are almost ubiquitous, smartphones have hit market saturation in the most developed nations, and EC2 is a cornerstone of modern business IT. The pace of technological progress continues to accelerate, it seems, as entire new product categories change the way we live and do business, and there’s no end in sight. Here’s our look ahead to 10 years in the future, and how the tech world may change in 9 ways: The biggest sources that companies use to find this new class of talent includes online labor marketplaces, freelancer networks, job boards, "in network" talent and social media. "By understanding where this talent exists, how it can be engaged, and the general parameters of how it should be managed, they will be able to drive additional value from the wealth of skillsets available in the on-demand talent marketplace," the study reports. 1.What we think of as productivity apps will change out of all recognition Sure, they’ve moved to the cloud and gotten a bit smarter over the years, but the productivity apps we use every day have remained functionally the same since their advent – a word processor is still a word processor, regardless of whether it’s WordStar or Google Docs, and a spreadsheet is still a spreadsheet, be it Lotus or Excel 2013.

However, no less than the inventor of the spreadsheet himself, Dan Bricklin, said that that’s going to change within the next 10 years.

Endpoint form factors are going to be the biggest driver of changes to productivity apps, Bricklin says. What we think of as productivity apps – spreadsheets, word processors and so on – are best used with a reasonably large screen and a keyboard.

But in a world where, increasingly, mobile devices are the way people enter the digital realm, traditional productivity apps don’t work as well. “So then the question becomes – what would be a productivity tool for somebody in that situation?”

Navigating a database while waiting in line at the grocery store, for example, isn’t the way most people use their smartphones, so it’s unlikely to catch on, notes Bricklin, who is currently CTO at Alpha Software.

It may be, in fact, that productivity apps become much more diverse and specialized – rather than directly editing a spreadsheet on a smartphone, for example, a user could simply speak into the device to add data to a system while on the move. Databases of repair information could help auto mechanics and plumbers. Click here to check other 8 reasons

(Courtesy: Jon Gold and Network World staff)