One of the interesting trends during the recession is that pay for top executives has stormed ahead while that for most people has been held back or reduced.

The recession has provided a good excuse to keep pressure on the remuneration levels for lower staff, and also to restrain their spending, and in many cases this has helped keep profit levels up, for which executives are then rewarded. If the economic difficulties continue, pay differences will increase, but shareholders will gradually start asking questions on the wisdom and necessity of paying such levels to senior staff just as they now are with junior staff.

It is hard not to feel some sympathy with retailers at the moment, but the further future shows some potential for fighting back against the current webification as the recovery takes hold. Certainly there are more tools in the box than just cost reduction and price increases.

The UK recession continues but it is frustrating that we see such narrow journalistic coverage of it. We see figures on overall sales, and overall this or that. A lot of interesting figures are left out.

Back in the days when networks and networking services were designed, built and operated by telcos (telecoms companies to those of you who don't live in IT) there was a great vision of the future, where an information superhighway would connect everyone at high speed to networks and we'd be able to build fantastic new services.

With Google’s project Tungsten recently in the news, I thought I’d dig out a blog I wrote on a similar topic 11 years ago.

The BBC has managed to recover much of the data from their Domesday project in 1986 and put it on the web. Back then, a mere 25 years ago, people were asked to document some aspects of their area and lives, and it was all stored on laserdiscs - we didn't have the web then so it seemed a good idea at the time.

The BBC has usually been pretty good on technology awareness, so it wasn't that they lacked understanding, it is just that technology comes and goes and it isn't always obvious which will survive. At the time, laserdiscs were thought to be a modern storage technique, a large format CD basically, aimed mainly at video storage.

It is an interesting time for the IT industry. After two decades of convergence, we are finally at the point where pretty much all IT companies are realising that they are pretty much in the same markets. With almost full convergence of TV and PCs, and now tablets making the missing link, expanding into books and magazines as well as games, we now have direct and very open competition between players who were in very different markets just a year or two ago.

We are in interesting times. The web is mature, we have fast PCs, reasonable broadband speed and small mobile phones that do lots, 3D TV and pretty realistic computer games. I often envy my 16 year old daughter and wish I was just growing up now.

Each decade brings a new batch of technology. Some is just incremental upgrades, other stuff is brand new. The next decade will be very exciting. There are a number of areas where breakthroughs will change our lives and one blog article is far too short to go into them all. The highlight for me is augmented reality. Just starting now, it has huge potential.