Technology will become intuitive (From The Wiltshire Gazette and Herald)

Technology will become intuitive

The future of Swindon as a bustling business metropolis is, of course, uncertain. But that hasn't stopped four of the town's most prominent business players from debating the shape of things to come

Paul Jameson, managing director of Outsource UK, an IT recruitment agency.

Information technology has always been import-ant to Swindon with Intel, Motorola, Inter-graph, Lucent Tech-nologies and National Semiconductors all based here.

Computers have left the air-conditioned mainframe 'glass-room' run by an

elite team of math-ematicians producing management reports, to invade every aspect of our corporate and personal lives.

Predicting the IT future is an imprecise science.

But in Swindon, pressure will increase on large and medium size companies to continue off-shoring IT development to save labour costs.

The UK's Silicon Valley has capacity for growth in Reading and Bracknell before growth extends up the M4 corridor to Swindon. But with lower living costs and talented IT labour, Swindon will always attract IT start-ups and small IT companies will thrive.

Redundancies in IT will stop because demand for IT skills will outstrip supply.

The trend towards miniaturisation and automation will continue. Working from home will be more common. As mobile technology frees people to work remotely, there will also be less traffic jams in Swindon.

Barring major changes in the political scene, all software engineering will be done in China as well as hardware manufacture.

There will be no computers as we understand them today. Boxes on our desk with keyboards and mice will disappear. Instead, computers will be intuitive and will understand what we want them to do.

There will be a significant sociological gap between the computer savvy and computer illiterates. Indeed, the IT haves and have-nots will not recognise each other's lifestyles.