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>>>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.
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>>Well, there is F# <g>
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>>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.
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>>So, there's a lot going on, although most of it is happening behind the proverbial curtain.
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>I'm not saying that nothing is happening but given that our computing power has gone up drastically in the last 10 years there have not been drastic changes in computing techology. As you point out most of what's happening today is consolidation - reusing existing technology in interesting new ways. This yields some interesting improvements but they are far from revolutionary.
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>The last really big change in computing was when the Web became public 15 years ago. Maybe Web Services/distributed computing and Ajax and maybe even phone based browsing rate, but hardly on the scale of the of change that we saw in the glory years of PCs.
>Complexity is catching up with us where change requires significant resources.

No doubt about that.

I'm not sure I agree with you about computing technology becoming stagnant in recent years. Sure, web browsers have been around for a while now. But as developers, not users, the expectations of the web experience have changed a lot, with tools evolving tremendously to help us meet the demand. We have come a long way from HTML text editors. Web development is not my full time focus (probably should be) but I do try to keep up with what is going on. It practically makes me dizzy.