Wolfram: I can’t claim to foresee that far ahead. But I can say what’s guiding us, both our key principles and the picture we see outside. Computation has come of age, and is now used by everyone, either explicitly or implicitly. Our job is to drive adoption of computation by engineering ever greater abilities. Abilities may be raw computational power or power of automation to refine or dramatically re-engineer workflows in every field and at every level of computational endeavor.

In a sense Wolfram|Alpha was just such a re-engineering by injecting computation into knowledge. Our technology — both released and in the pipeline — is really strong right now and is proving what we’ve said for years. But it’s taken until now to build up to what it is today: a single coherent, integrated platform that delivers dramatically more power, usability and reliability.

And our rate of development is so much greater than before because we’re using Mathematica technology as our prime development environment. In fact Wolfram|Alpha’s development and HPC deployment is only practically possible because of the technology tower we’ve built up over more than 20 years. Not everyone checks out Wolfram technologies for what they’re building or analyzing but I think from the Wolfram language to our Workbench IDE to CDF or web deployment we have a very compelling offering.