Here's a thought for the day: "The computer no longer matters - only the information does." That's the proclamation of Craig Mathias, a principal with Farpoint Group, a wireless and mobile advisory firm. In a pointed InformationWeek editorial, Mathias contends that: 

The business climate will continue to place an ever-greater emphasis on cost/performance for some time. As a direct consequence, more workers will be mobile; the office will continue to become an abstraction. And everyone's dependence upon timely access to information, communications, and other IT resources, no matter where they might happen to be, will continue to grow. Advances in wireless technology were profound in the last decade, but the next 10 years will be remembered as the era where we all became, for lack of a better term, truly location-independent.

This new era of "infocentricity," as Mathias calls it, could also be called the era of cloud computing, since we're all now well-versed in the advantages of moving some enterprise operations onto the Internet using subscription and pay-as-you-go models. We're done with the "computercentric era," Mathias says. In this new age, "apps aren't really as bound to devices as is the case with the PC."

Read Mathias's entire essay to get a fresh perspective on what we're all already talking about: the increasing mobility of the workforce that demands applications everywhere, on any device.

-- Don Willmott