I vividly remember the fall of 1998 when I was walking back to my condominium from Indigo bookstore (Canadian version of Barnes and Nobles) on Yonge street (the longest street in the world) in Toronto. I was deep in my thoughts, thinking about my career. The main question on my mind was “Where the hell do I want to see myself in five years?”  

I was passionately enjoying my job in the IT department of an investment company back then. The problem was I was involved in everything including IP networking, Database, programming, OS, and everything else. But I knew for a fact that I could not go far by lacking concentration and focus. 

I finally made a decision thru a process of elimination. I knew I didn’t want to be and infrastructure person so that immediately ruled out IP networking and to some extent OS. I however did love data movement and transformation in applications. So I made a decision to be a data guy because I thought the necessity (and hence the demand) for data management has always been there and will never go away. 

To my own surprise I was right. “Surprise” because I’ve never predicted anything that came out right. Or better said, I’ve always learned by making mistakes. However in this case and as the internet is going thru its versions (1.0, 2.0, and now 3.0) it is becoming more and more about data. 

Web 1.0: I have some data let me show you.

Web 2.0: I have some data, you have some data, let’s share it with each other thru soap.

Web 3.0: I have gigantic amount of data. My application can navigate thru it and do the thinking for your application.

I know this is too much simplicity but there is some veracity in it.