They missed spring cleaning season, but Avocent wants to find the messiest desktop and computer cable ball of yarn possible. That’s the idea behind their Spaghetti Mess contest. Winners will receive an Avocent desktop KVM (Keyboard, Video, Mouse) switch, one of which helps me keep my clutter under control. Well, I still have lots of cable mess, but I only need one keyboard and monitor to handle four computers. Swallow your embarrassment and enter and maybe you’ll get to swallow one of the free spaghetti dinners going to some entrants. If your mess is now, what is tomorrow? Intuit, the Quicken and QuickBooks company, can justifiably claim to know more about the current state of small businesses than anyone based on their dominance of the small business accounting market. They’ve hired the Institute of the Future to peer out to 2017 and see what the world of small business will look like in another decade. The report title is “The Connected World of Entrepreneurs.” Not surprisingly (Intuit is a computer company, after all), small businesses in the future will use more technology
to do more business functions. But conclusions point more to a report that Blackberry should have sponsored: mobile devices will proliferate, manage more processes, and allow us to work anytime from anywhere. Of course, small business owners already work all the time from everywhere, so I hope life gets easier in the future. Social networking via the Internet will become more important, which I believe. Virtual worlds will become more important for reaching customers, which I think will take longer than a decade for most customers. There’s no question things will change, most likely even faster than they’ve changed the last decade. But since complexity always slides into chaos, I hope we get a bit smarter in the next decade ourselves and don’t put all our trust in the great grandson of the iPhone.
