nathanwosnack - BYOD is a big deal now, but I don't epect it will be in three years. It'll be a solved problem. Companies will have figured out how to manage BYOD devices (or ban them) and the ones who haven't figured it out will have ample precedent to draw on. 

Brian Newby - Today, at Best Buy, I went to get a PSP that I had seen online. There are about 10 Best Buys in the metropolitan area and last night only one had this unit available for pickup.

So, today, I bop there, can't find it, decide to use my phone to buy it online and pick it up (walking from an aisle to the counter), only to see that it wasn't available there, either.

Exactly. If a company doesn't have merchandise in stock, that's not a problem that can be blamed on online competition.

nathanwosnack - Silicon Valley does seem to be in a slump. For the past five years, innovation there has consisted of endless rechurning of the same social media ideas. 

I've always assumed everything I put on Facebook, Twitter, etc., was public for the world to see, no matter what the privacy settings said. 

And yet during the holiday break, I had some holiday news I want to share with just friends and family, and wished there was a social network I could trust to do that. 

mharden - "We are not going to let the application dictate how we run this company!"

But it's also important to unnecessarily reinvent business processes that have already been solved. Payroll and accounts-payable already works, so businesses shouldn't go to the trouble and expense of building their own. 

Wait, @Mitch -- why is the importance of social media listening on the bad cliché list for 2013?

I'm sorry to say that as long as brands and businesses don't get it, it still needs to be repeated.  I know we've pretty much well said all that can be said about it, but it's still important.

"but I'm tired of the videoification of everything". Me too.

May be you can say I am biased because naturally if I had a choice, I would rather choose to read a book than to watch a movie based on that same book. I really don't know on what statistics they are basing their axiom that people would rather watch a video than reading text. 

As you rightly noted, not many of us have the same strong internet connection to be able to watch videos with ease. I have been in places where it is almost impossible to watch Youtube videos. Even the Vlogs here at Internet evolution, I have not been able to access them for sometime now. 

"The reality is that the cloud brings its own problems. IT needs to be sure that the data in the cloud is secure and available to users when they need it. The cloud really does have many benefits; it's great to have a highly elastic infrastructure, to be able to easily scale to meet business needs, and to have specialists overseeing data and applications. But cloud brings problems, too, and requires specialized IT skills. It even requires insurance."

The Cloud just like our many imperfect systems on which our lives are run, provides the best computing proposition for enterprises. As you rightly noted in the above statement, the cloud has its own problems but I think the economies of scale the cloud provides far outweighs the problems you've mentioned. Iam with the belief that as our understanding of the cloud grows, we should be in a very strong position to provide appropiate mitigation measures to all of these problems. 

The Cloud to me represents the future of computing!