The booming professional services industry smells to me like a high-margin trap. Services have been a salvation for many companies, IBM being a prime example. Lou Gerstner, a heroic leader with a relentless customer focus, has proven himself a titan. But I still say services are vulnerable. Each new turn of Moore's Law enables software to do miraculous things.
Software can easily render a service routine.
Jini, the latest software brainchild of Sun Microsystems' cofounder, Bill Joy. The device's operating system doesn't matter. Jini also allows your little PalmPilot to draw unused processing power from any brute on the network, even a supercomputer. Lord knows if Jini will work. Eric Schmidt told me at lunch the other day that full Jini implementation will take years and years.