What’s next? Biotech, life science, nanotech

Looking forward I think there is little doubt that the two most promising technologies out there today are biotech: Life sciences and essentially computational genetics and the relationship between IT and genetics. And the second would be nanotechnology: The ability to essentially create customized materials by manipulating the atoms. In many ways these are actually more powerful technologies than IT ever was or ever could be. But the interesting thing is that both of them are totally dependent and will be increasingly integrated with IT. And it's the combination of IT and life sciences and nanotechnology, it's all coming together, that starts to really say that future progress and technology could be dramatically more powerful than anything we've seen so far and almost certainly will be over the next 10, 20 or 30 years.I think as you move into a world driven by life sciences or nanotechnologies, once again leadership starts to move back to the suppliers, because you're in the early stages of those technologies, and it will take probably a number of years for those technologies to reach a point where the customers are now active users of those. So, I think it is fair to say leadership goes in waves and in new technologies the suppliers have the advantage, but as technologies mature things, power, shifts to the customer and for nanotech and biotech clearly the supply-side has the upper hand in terms of making that happen and that's where the wealth and power will be in those industries for the foreseeable future.