Worst of all their company spokespeople might even half believe what they are saying, condemning their shareholders, staff, "partners" and users to even more rapid loss of relevance. They believe it because they are stuck in today's version of IBM's legendary "the world will never need more than four computers", the even simpler and no longer significant meme of "business computers".

What is actually happening is that the whole idea of protectable "business models" is going down the toilet. Primary production aside where we desparately need to return a greater share of dollars and humans, nothing that is not continually reinventing itself can survive what the internet is doing to attention spans, and thereby meeting some overwhelming human needs that until now have mostly been tackled by religion, alcohol and other addictive props.

There have never been more than four companies driving IT in any given period. Today Apple have more of a clue than they have ever had, Amazon have at least half a clue, Google is all over the place and we are still waiting to see who can actually make sense out of whatever it is that is being pioneered by Twitter and Facebook. You really can forget the rest. They are all in passenger seats, with or without belts fastened.

Which brings us back to why I ordered and bought the first and second versions of the iPod touch on the first possible day, but aren't stressed about picking up an iPad 2 before the queues thin and only just picked up an iPhone 4 because doing so actually reduced my monthly outlay. The iPad was the reason I was so anxious to touch the touch, even though it was years in the future, by which time I had no use for version 1.

From the time of Alan Kay's Dynabook there has never been any reason to doubt that everyday use of the iPad would rapidly swamp the business use of computers. While Kinect might turn into Mouse II, the other fringe players would be much better off looking for space in the iPad ecosystem than spouting nonsense in the hopes of slowing things down while they struggle to come up with some half breed competitor that they can proclaim to be business oriented.