This could not be possibly more earth-shaking than the recent tragedy in Haiti but Gartner's timing of releasing it's predictions and timetables deserve it's own Richter-scale measure.

As far as IT predictions go, you just got to love Gartner.  Not only does it bring its authoritative voice and influence to what would otherwise be other-worldly as far as its statements and timelines  are concerned despite the suspicion of "Are they really better than the Mayans?".  Yet for what it's worth, there's no other goup out there that's braver and willing to take flak for being so candid about what the world of IT and business would be like in the years to come.  That and their vast amount of data and knowlegable analysts. I'm sure a review of past predictions would be a better gauge of their batting average but so far no one's complaining. 

A couple of points. (Read full press of Gartner's IT Predictions. Interesting.)

- Third party IT assets handling becomes norm by 2012.  Cloud and virtualization offshoot or economics, 'play-by-your-strengths' driven is offshoring's next episode.

- India vaporizes cloud competition in 2 years.

- Production methods become the clima-culprit as actual products like PCs become really energy-efficient.

- Oh and world is increasingly, err, going mobile. Sure looks like it.

For all we know, such reports are actually self-fulfilling and with this current batch of predictions, I have no reason to complain.  Besides, who would want cash-endowned mobile consumer services providers to just brush aside 'context'.  Hopefully, we all get that concept sooner.  Otherwise, we're just target markets being fired upon by rhetorics packaged like WMDs.