The Cutter IT Journal just published an article of mine along these lines.  I’m a big fan of analogies, and the ’80’s presents a lot of analogies to today’s world: new disruptive platform, specialized apps as the key, ultimate disruption of an entire IT paradigm.

Here’s a link to the Cutter IT Journal issue.  For some legacy-ish reason, Cutter Consortium will let you download a pdf of the journal but won’t put it online.

As always, let me know your thoughts.