In the Beginning was the Mainframe

Similarly, within mainframe and large server applications, redundant functionality will be washed out into the valleys and flood plains, which will silt up with smaller, commodity blade computers.

But the large machines will still be there, doing what they are best at, being more "exotic" than the heavily farmed low-lying areas.

How we access the world has also changed. In the early days, climbing a mountain was something that a few could be proud of, but now even if you cannot scale a mountain on foot, you can fly around it and see its glories up close.

With the technology world, we have driven connectivity and interoperability, opening up the large mountains and the rolling hills to the flood plain dwellers.

The next generation of service-oriented composite applications will find a way up to the highest parts of the mountains.

For the purist, this has little attraction: being one of the few who can physically go there is a big part of the attraction.

But we may be able to keep everyone happy - for example by virtualising the whole experience and allowing people to "be there" from the real comfort of their own environment.

Similarly in IT, there will always be those who prefer to keep all others out of their domain. But integration and the removal of functional redundancy is all to the good.

And the ending to this analogy? It is that you cannot change what you have got completely, and the world will only change slowly around you.

But in a world in which you are just a very small item, changing your viewpoint can let you appreciate things a lot more.

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