>>I don't think anything will ever match the sizzle of what we saw in the late 1980's. Maybe it's because it was all new territory back then and we were all youngsters witnessing history.

Other industries continue to see breathtaking improvements, including the absolute reality that quality flows from standardization and simplification.

Whereas IT continues to celebrate cottage industry behavior with self-proclaimed journeymen locking in variability that they say is better quality. It's as if every vehicle still is built by hand, not just Rolls Royce for people who want to pay extra for that sort of thing. By now, an awful lof of what IT does ought to be commodity and one day customers will decide that a hand-beaten specialist item actually is a hobby for the craftsman, not automatically a better result than a similar item churned out in identical thousands in a factory for 1/10 of the price.

>>But aside from that, this "lost sight of the user and focused on IT" isn't necessarily a bad thing at all. Vendors focus on empowering IT so that IT groups CAN provide good solutions for clients. No, they don't always get it right - but these gross generalizations just don't accomplish anything.

This whole model is the problem. When you say "empowering IT" you mean creating an environment for artisans to produce expensive hand beaten spoons that apparently are better than 20 stainless steel ones for the same price that the originator ought to be churning out by now. Not just me saying this- displacing movements in IT such as Google also are acting on this, offering all sorts of "good enough" commodity that quietly is picked up by corporates who thereby eliminate the Rube Goldberg practitioners. You may not yet see this in the MS ecosystem, but tides be a-changing.