How and when will the next "feature push" come?

Selling technology has not been a giant challenge for a really long time. Why? The customers hate their technology and if they rely on it they are willing to spend more money on it to improve it. The trick to selling, to the smallest mortgage broker all the way up as the CIO of the largest bank, has been a mix of being at the right place at the right time and being an answer to the problem of why the computer is slowing down the worker.

We are starting to see the worker catching up to the computer, and vice versa, leaving very little room for the actual software to solve the human problems.

As a result, many on the bottom tier of the IT industry have moved to managed services and the leaders in the software development are running around tripping over the table-computer hybrids trying to figure out a way to solve an infrastructure problems with hosting. Just who is working on the application feature set for business?

Truth is, a lot of people, but they are meeting the wall head on and leaving a lot of blood-brain stained spots on it. Not only is the “innovation” not a hit, but it tends to anger the users that are not willing to accept change to what is already working for them, even if the new solution could work better. Office 2007’s new interface has been met with enough resistance to cause major part of our customer base to simply ignore it. Windows Server 2008, codename “Is it out? Really? Ah well” marked the most giant leap in software management since the batch file got rem’ed out of popular use, is not even on the radar of any of the IT people I deal with. Then there is Vista.

What is the incentive to even work on or invest in deployment of large scale IT solutions if the consumer is gawking at the stripped-down, minimalist solutions like Gmail and Mac OS X?

Where does the money come for, for the would be IT generation, if the user is not interested in what the computer and software can do for them but instead just wish the computer would get out of their way of getting “it” done?

Where does that leave the field of IT consulting?