Are there other important trends under way in software?

The whole outsourcing and globalization phenomenon is widely misunderstood. People think it's all about cost, and cost certainly was an initial driver. But it's turned into a story about agility, about access to expertise, and about the technological and business enablers.

It's also about organizational enablers. For example, there's Conway's Law, which says that a piece of software will reflect the organizational structure that produced it. My colleague [Carnegie Mellon computer science professor] Jim Herbsleb has taken that bit of folklore and turned it into a science of how you can align your software architecture with your organizational structure to minimize coordination across organizational interfaces. That's an amazingly cool thing.

Perhaps the biggest issue going forward is how to manage enterprise-scale architectural innovation. Across the industry, we've become really good at small team development. But the secret sauce at so many companies is the managed architectural innovation that frames the activity of the many small teams that operate seemingly independently. Amazon is a great example.