Remember those childhood projects? The ones where you had to paint a picture of the future? What things'd be like when we were really old? Like 30? We'd all paint hover cars, collarless shirts, robots doing the housework, telepods - all of that. We all thought we'd be well past Mars and on our way up Uranus (tee hee)

How wrong we all were. It's all pretty much the same except with mobile phones and worse manners. And no Top of the Pops. Did we hear somewhere that there's a moon landing in the offing sometime over the next five years?

Things is, when Bill Gates paints a picture of the future, he's generally not far off. It's almost like he is privy to some inside info. Anyway, he's at it again. Check out this article

Seems we're well on our way to becoming .... The Borg

The question we have to ask however is, with reference to our common interest in  "management systems and the like", if these ISO chappies continue to be locked into this current 7 year review cycle, how on earth can they expect to retain any relevance to the modern world? Is this an example of an improvement technique (systematic review) that is designed to deliver obsolescence? Also, as it's been a nailed on certainty that these techie types (geeks, whatever) are likely to shape the world of our futures, how come our standards continue to be trusted to (we generalise for a second) the old engineering brigade

We have no answer