So what's next? The next big thing in my crystal ball is something I'm calling "instrumenting reality": Using the networking and processing capabilities we've developed over the past 25 years to manage, control and modify the real world.

Some context: The big revolution in the 1980s was all about computing power -- getting more of it via Moore's law, and putting it ever closer to users via the development of minicomputers and desktop PCs. The big revolution in the 1990s and the early part of this decade was networking -- harnessing that computing horsepower to create, in effect, a vast distributed computing system.

With networking came the ability to create virtual reality -- a new way to interact with each other and with machines in the virtual world. Web browsers, search engines, blogs, wikis and Twitter are all richer and more powerful ways to interact in the virtual environment.

The next big revolution, though, isn't about doing more in virtual space.

It's about making the leap from the virtual world to the real one by developing the tools and technologies to use the virtual world to better manage and modify the real one.