What is the future of the software industry?

Answer 1

The future of IT may be that IT as we know it no longer exists. The advent of very low cost high speed internet access has opened the door to Cloud computing being a viable replacement for enterprise applications and the explosion of consumer applications including mobile computing.

The internal IT department may remain but in a more decentralized model with more and more systems and infrastructure moving to off premise providers leaving behind analysts and integration people to make the cloud applications work.

Answer 2

The fufture of the software industry can be viewed accroding to the past:

1. Programming is made more high level:

Early computers were programmed with machine language.

In the early '90s there was the software crisis, the software size grew bigger, but the programming languages were not fit to handle big programs. This lead to the development of object oriented programming languages.

2. New computer hardware required new software to support it and exploit its advantages.

Today there are several trends that may continue:

1. High internet bandwidth will lead to the development of more web applications.

2. Muli-core CPUs will require parallel programming models to supprt it.

3. Open source libraries and knowledge sharing will continue.

Answer 3

Because IT means Information Technology, it is a loose enough definition to encompass everything we will ever invent.