IMO the one real way for an "ultimate" to emerge is for it to be able to do a lot of heavy lifting for you: and that basically means it has to be a managed clou

IMO the one real way for an "ultimate" to emerge is for it to be able to do a lot of heavy lifting for you: and that basically means it has to be a managed cloud service. It's just not going to be reasonable in pure software to service the vast majority of the needs of the vast majority of your applications. But in the cloud with managed services the possibility space changes massively