The technology business tends to advance in waves as new ideas are adopted. For an example, there were successive waves of mainframes, minicomputers and then personal computers, with the fourth wave being networking, mobile, or whatever. But people don't always agree what the "next wave" is, or will be, and some technologies never become as important as people might have imagined. "Natural user interfaces" such as natural-language speech and handwriting, for example, have been touted for decades without getting much traction. And despite all Bill Gates's efforts, Tablet PCs have never taken off.
For a company, picking the wrong trends to follow can make life difficult or lead to disaster. If, at the start of this decade, you invested in strategies based on using fax machines or standalone videophones, DAT, WAP or DAB, "push technologies" or paperless offices, then you might not have done as well as if you'd chosen blogging, social networking, or a user-generated content strategy.
With the end of the decade approaching, you've been invited to a meeting to decide what will be the most important technology for your company in the next five to 10 years. What do you pick, and why?
Note: we pose a query every week, and the best comments are excerpted and published in the Guardian's Technology section, which appears on Thursdays. It's up to you to avoid making any comment that you'd be embarrassed to see in print.
