I'd say quite a bit more has changed. Aside from the huge growth of cloud services (Google Apps, Office 365, Amazon EC2 private clouds, etc), the explosion of b

I'd say quite a bit more has changed. Aside from the huge growth of cloud services (Google Apps, Office 365, Amazon EC2 private clouds, etc), the explosion of bring-your-own-device policies, and the enormous advances in connectivity (10 years ago a mid-sized office often had a T1. Now we have dual-500mps connections), consider that most software stacks are completely virtualized now (and anything that isn't is on the short track to being so). That changes everything. Suddenly an external vendor can provide your entire hardware platform, whether by dropping in their own managed hardware solution, or by hooking you into their cloud via a dedicated connection, and that's just for the few outliers that aren't provide as SaaS. The world has completely changed, from a networking, platform, and device perspective. I am perplexed by some of the comments to this article, and have to believe it is a bit of a head-in-the-sand approach. Do I think IT will be gone in 5 years? Hardly. But change is coming at a ferocious pace, and those who ignore it do so at their own peril.