No new tools will emerge that make capital creation possible by small players? That's a very hubris-tic thinking. I can already think of at least one that emer

No new tools will emerge that make capital creation possible by small players? That's a very hubris-tic thinking. I can already think of at least one that emerged recently - unprecedented parallel computation power. "Recently" here meaning after google IPO: virtualization, out of the box distributed computing, out of the box data mining/data analysis tools, on-demand datacenter capacity, cheap multi-core CPUs. This "tool" just needs a "killer app" that would make this attractive to consumers (all these technologies are already attractive to businesses and are being adopted at enormous rate): I can already think of big players providing desktop virtualization, one YC funded start-up providing a virtualization based "Windows app store". Here's another "tool" related to this theme: kernels and networking stacks are able to handle increasingly higher and higher number of simultaneous connections (here's a thought: read up on the epoll Linux system call and try and see if Meebo would have been able to start without a significant up-front hardware investment if such a facility was not available). The only reason I mentioned those "tools" is that it's my specific interest: distributed computing. I see no reason to think there aren't other such tools. For the 2005-2008 "Web 2.0" boom, for example these tools were AJAX, Flash and broadband connections -- allow web applications to not only feel and act like desktop applications, but also do what only desktop applications once could, e.g. edit and play video or edit/mark-up photos in full size and colour. Would youtube or Flickr (both of which brought money to their investors) have taken off if there wasn't wide-spread adoption of cable and DSL? Also I fail to see how "cleantech" (as much as great deal of it is buzzwords) can't create any new such tools: what about low power, low cost CPUs powering smart-phones and netbooks? Now any one can build rich applications that have almost persistent power and Internet connection (an Internet-connected computer independent of the power or land-line phone/cable grid that's hundreds of times faster than the computers provided computing power to entire universities).