Part 2 of Bill Howard's series looking back at four decades of computing and where it will take us in the future of computing.

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Part 2 of a two-part series

By Bill Howard, Former Chief CIO Advocate and Advisor to the CEO

This article is Part 2 of "Four Decades of Modern Computing: A Retrospective for the Future." In Part 1, I briefly reviewed four decades of computing which spanned my career in IT. I ended last month's letter with a challenge to the industry to focus more on the quality of the user experience and promised to make a few predictions about the future of computing based on observations of the past.

What follows are my observations of the major trends that will shape IT over the next five to 10 years. The single biggest factor affecting the computing landscape of the future is the size, scale, and reach of the network. We are clearly on a path where everybody and everything is being connected to the network — billions of people and trillions of things. This will be the major driver of things to come — new low cost devices for access and interaction, new business models to realize ROI, and new technologies to store and retrieve the massive amounts of data generated each year. Exciting times are ahead.

Narrowing the Digital Divide

Hundreds of millions of new participants will be on the Internet enabled, by new low cost devices and lower cost access. According to Internet World Stats, there are 939 million Internet users today in a world population of 6.42 billion people. The global Internet penetration rate is only 14.6 percent. The top 20 countries account for over 80 percent of users.