I've never fully embraced the name of this column, "Final Thoughts." I get it, this is the last page of the magazine, so is the final word in the literal sense. But the column name sounds like a last will and testament, or less ominously, as if this is all the columnist will ever have to say on a particular topic. Is anything final in life, except life itself?

Certainly not in the world of application development, deployment, and management. One of the most conspicuous aspects of today's IT environment, in fact, is the fact that applications are never done, and they must change in a truly fluid, 24/7 environment. No more development "cycles" or scheduled upgrades, or anything that is linked to something as medieval as a monthly and daily calendar.

After a calendar in most of the Western world has days named after ancient Norse gods like Thor, Tiu, and Woden, slightly less ancient Roman rulers, and the very, very ancient Sun and Moon. But even in more practical Japan, with its business-like "one-day," "two-day", etc. naming convention, the calendar is a hopelessly anachronistic method for allowing everyone to get a grip on the task at hand.

There can be no final thoughts in IT development and management today. There is no end of it. And that's the good news.

Business phrases like "maintaining competitive advantage," "enriching the customer experience," or "reducing total cost of ownership" actually have real thoughts behind them. They all strike to the heart of the ultimate goal in a capitalistic society to take more money in than goes out, while competing against all comers in an environment that is not a zero-sum game.

This last aspect is often ignored by dour managers who view any competitor's sale as money lost, but is a critical aspect to the belief that efficiency can drive an economy, and a good economy can drive more efficiency. If the magnificent gains in agricultural productivity over the past 50 years could be matched by similar efficiencies in the way the world consumes and uses energy resources over the next 50 years, then we would truly live in a zero-sum game world that can eliminate poverty, disease, and human suffering.

Oh, and while outlining these utopian dreams, it's worth noting that politicians need to behave a little better as well, whether they are now-brutish dictators in the unfortunate corners of the world or craven demagogues in the more fortunate societies. Even the most sophisticated IT deployments can do little to solve this problem, although the idea of increasingly transparent e-government services does hold promise in delivering government services more efficiently and perhaps even leading to a demand by the world's citizens to expect more transparency from its leaders.

In any case, there will not be a final thought on earth until the day the sun finally morphs into a red giant and undoes all of the earth's eternal verities, from Egypt's pyramids to China's Great Wall to America's Dick Clark.

The subject of the day may change from abstractions such as web services to general approaches such as service-orieneted architectures, to specific products and environments such as WAS in particular and WebSphere in general. But the challenge never changes, and that is to realize that everything has not already been invented, as many thought at the end of the 19th century, that we are nowhere near the end of history, as at least one misguided academic thought at the end of the 20th century, and that the world is not flat, as one misguided author and many misguided commentators seem to think at the dawn of the 21st century.

Because at the end of the day, all we can do is push things forward incrementally, mindful of the ancient calendar perhaps, but aware that customer needs will continually evolve, as will therefore the necessity to always think of what is the next thing that needs to be done. And that's my final thought on this subject...for now.