Is the Party Over? The Flattening S-Curve of IT Innovation

I don't think there's any shortage of places that could benefit from innovation, but there are a lot of roadblocks now.

For instance, of course there's a way to do better than Exchange and Outlook, of course there's a way to improve Office, of course Windows has major flaws. But just try selling the business model of "unseat Microsoft" in any number of areas.

One possible way forward is virtualization. Until recently, it was impractical to run established applications without committing the hardware to one legacy OS, which brought everything else down to the same level of ancient technology. If it is finally feasible to demote Windows to, er, a window, I.T. would finally be free to explore something new in a way that would not break any of their core investment in software.