If there’s one thing that transforms my city every year it is Mobile World Congress. For one week, MWC is at the very top of the agenda for all press, politicians, hotels, restaurants, taxis and unfortunately even pickpockets! And of course, 1,500 exhibitors and over 67,000 visitors from 205 countries have a positive impact to the city.

Is it me or has the whole debate around Machine to Machine and The Internet of things become almost like a scene from a high end auction room?  It seems as though a number of vendors have gone into chest beating mode in a bid to outdo each other with forecasts that seem to go up in 10’s of Billions of connected devices each time a new one emerges.

“10 Billion, 20 Billion, 50 Billion”. “Sold to the man in the tweed trilby hat”

OK so that’s a little flippant but as an industry we seem to have got ourselves into a ‘feel the quantity, forget the quality’ debate that at best appears shallow and self serving at worst appears to have completely missed a pretty fundamental point.

IT Trends bear a striking resemblance to London buses. 

You can wait ages for one to come along and then find that, annoyingly, three arrive all at the same time.  Think of it, as we came out of the dot com crash of the early 2000’s, things were relatively quiet in terms of major trends and then, seemingly from nowhere, we get hit with Cloud, Consumerization, Machine to Machine and Smart Grid to name but a few, all of which leave businesses looking at their IT departments with the same facial expression that a child has when confronting parents with their latest homework: knowledge and expectation.