Technologies for 2025

CFO.com: When CFO began publishing, back in the primordial ooze of 1985, each issue contained a sizable amount of technology coverage. The editorial slant made sense. The arrival of IBM’s original personal computer just a few years earlier, and the subsequent release of Lotus 1-2-3, had turned the finance function on its head. Suddenly liberated from the drudgery of manually tabulating figures, controllers and finance chiefs found they could close the books in days, not lunar cycles. Moreover, groundbreaking new programs like Quicken and Hardisk Accounting made rolling up columns into the general ledger a snap.
Not surprisingly, many, if not most, of the products we covered two decades ago seem quaint today. For instance, a mobile telephone that barely fits in the trunk of a car hardly qualifies as mobile now; likewise, a 28-pound Compaq Portable computer isn’t all that portable. Nevertheless, a number of the first-generation products we’ve reported on over the years — accounting software, laptop computers, and, later, E-mail and enterprise resource planning software — have become standard operating equipment in the office of the 21st century.
What will be the revolutionary technologies of the next 20 years? As any futurist will admit, there’s simply no clear answer. Experts say exponentially faster processors, coupled with a vastly improved communications network, could usher in the era of pervasive computing. It could just as easily usher in an era of pervasive irritability, as information overload becomes commonplace. Wild cards such as nanotechnology and phenotropics (software) may take things in completely unexpected directions.
That said, we decided to read the tea leaves and predict which innovations will radically transform commerce over the next two decades. Of course, we also consulted with analysts, scientists, and CIOs. While all had differing opinions on what the next big things will be, a few technologies kept coming up in our conversations, and we settled on those. Not content merely to identify the technologies, we also forecast the years when they will be widely adopted. (If we’re wrong, talk to us in 2025.)
In the Year 2025 [CFO.com]