The information revolution is well underway. At some times, it feels like the revolution came and went already along with the easy money in the 1990's. Other times, it feels like the process has just begun.

I have been looking at some companies recently and thinking about this information age. It strikes me that the past 20 or 30 years have been a process of getting computers physically installed in every business and every market. We started with 'big iron' mainframes, then the personal computer revolution with a computer on every desktop, and now we have portable computers like Blackberry's so that we can carry our computer everywhere.

But that was just the first wave of the revolution.

Now that we have all these computers, the problem is that they just dont work very well. People waste a lot of time just trying to get them working (or surfing the web), trying to keep them working and trying to get them to work with each other. Computers increased productivity in many industries, sometimes amazing improvements, but there is clearly room to increase the productivity of this new hardware/software world.

And that is the next wave. The "next big thing" will be tools that let us use what we already have efficiently and do things that just werent possible without computers. We already see a glimmer of this with Google, as they try to organize the newly created gigantic piles of data so that it can be referenced, ie searched, efficiently.

But search is just the tip of the iceberg. The next 20 or 30 years will see another big hump on the productivity curve as people learn how to use our new tools to become increasingly efficient and competitive. I expect to see standards that facilitate data-transportation, machine learning and search functions that can make sense of mountains of data, and clever ways to use the information that is already there for something new.

These changes may not help our economy the way the 1990's did but it will be interesting to watch. And with any luck in a future not too far away, one wont need an MSCE certification to keep their desktop computer running.