>Look at the software industry. For 20 years the field was growing by leaps and bounds. Things were changing, drastic improvements and innovations happened all the time. The last 9 years (since the dot com crash) have been at a standstill. The only big thing that came along in this timeframe is browsers embracing AJAX functionality and a whole new eco-system evolving around that but that's the extent of it. Innovation for big picture type improvements for computing for a large part has stopped.


Well, there is F# <g>

It seems to me that most of the IT innovation in recent years has happened more in the infrastructure than actual tools. Cloud computing, cloud storage, Business Intelligence, Smart Grid, in-memory-processing/caching, Solid State Drives, Virtual Machines, parallel processing, load balancing, Internet tunneling... And the list goes on. Then there is innovation in creating software stacks, such as LAMP and Hadoop, which take disparate bits and pieces and assemble them into coherent, easy-to-install systems.

So, there's a lot going on, although most of it is happening behind the proverbial curtain.